


The World From Rusted Trains

by lullabies



Series: Foundations [2]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Really it covers all the timelines, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-05-18 06:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 70,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5902861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lullabies/pseuds/lullabies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes to get better, you have to run away. Faced with pressure from all sides, Steve takes Bucky to a cabin by the beach to try to put their lives back together.</p><p> A Hurt/Comfort Slow Burn kind of fic. </p><p>Updated on Thursdays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. All That Remains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me. 
> 
> (Updated Thursdays)

_From dusk to dawn._  
_The other's screams grow silent in defeat._  
_I know I chased a memory but you used to taste so sweet._  
_As you faded away I realized it's all over and nothing stays the same_  
_From our skulls and bones and grave._

Peggy had always meant to come and visit.

The thought had wandered into her mind before wandering right back out again. The intent was there, but there was always an excuse. Oh, she couldn’t tonight, perhaps next week. Then when next week came she would chide herself for never thinking to send a notice that she wanted to visit. To barge in without any warning would be unthinkable. Peggy would tuck the idea away; she would hide it behind layers of work and the sparse social life she had created for herself.

A year passed as if it were nothing. The war ended, but Peggy’s work continued.

“You just gonna sift through those thoughts forever?” Howard had said to her one day, flashing her a strained smile. “You’ll wear ‘em down to nothing.”

Howard knew; he’d always known. He’d cared deeply Steve too, Peggy knew, and he’d loved to go drinking with James. The world had allowed the four of them nearly two years to get to know each other, two years to find the people you’d never known you needed in your life, and then the rest of your life to cope with their loss. To Peggy it was hard to believe that two years had passed at all. The war had forced them all to sprint, to run from one battlefield to another, to chase down another lead, to destroy another fortress.

She had only seen Steve and James a handful of times over those two years, even though Howard had been able to see them more. With Stark Industries outfitting the Howling Commandos, it made sense - but there were days, those low grey days where Peggy had been angry that he’d been given the opportunities.

“You loved him,” Howard would say with a shrug, a crooked smile that sometimes Peggy would catch herself thinking of James when she looked at. That little lift at the corner of their mouths was something that both Barnes and Stark had in common. “Steve knew you loved him.”

“I never got to tell him,” Peggy would always say, smoothing down the folds of her skirt, and carefully noting the way she spoke. Even in front of Howard, she wasn’t willing to let that personal grief show. “He went into the water without ever hearing it.”

She had planned to tell him when they were able to dance. A dance promised at the beginning of the war and still unfulfilled at the end of it. Peggy had wanted it to be perfect, to be in Steve’s arms and to see the way that his face would change. It would be slow at first, she knew. The longer that Steve had stayed in his role as Captain America, the more that Steve Rogers had become buried under the hero the war needed him to be. So the smile would be slow, the mask still in place as he processed her words, but then it would spread across his face like the sun breaking past the horizon and Peggy would kiss him. She would kiss him like she had dreamed of kissing him for years.

Or maybe, she would surprise him. Peggy had loved when she’d been able to do that, the mask would fall away as Steve lifted his eyebrows, eyes widening before he full-on grinned.

Both scenarios ended in a kiss and in both scenarios, Peggy was the one who kissed Steve first.

“You got to kiss him though,” Howard was usually tinkering with something during these discussions, unable to stay still long enough to have a normal conversation without something in his hands. If he didn’t have something to keep his hands busy, his mind would wander instead, Howard had told them once.

James had been the one to tell Peggy the story of what the commandos had done to keep Howard’s mind from wandering. He had been delivering letters to her from Steve while Steve was stuck in another strategy meeting. “Steve sat Stark down and handed him one of those little china dolls. The ones that’re real popular with the girls.” James had grinned from ear to ear as he described it. “Can you picture it? Stark cradling a little baby doll in his arms while Steve has that straight face on him. And from then on, the Commandos always made sure Stark had a doll just for him.” James had tilted his head back then, affecting that same expression that Peggy had seen on Steve’s face so many times, quiet and stoic - toeing the line toward stern.

Howard’s face would have been a joy to behold, Peggy had laughed with James at the picture he painted so vividly. The doll would have been tiny in Howard’s arms with wide eyes and delicate little eyebrows like Peggy had seen in the shops before the war had broken out. It felt like decades ago now that she’d had that conversation.

“Stevie was nearly breakin’ his teeth trying not to laugh, but Stark didn’t know that. I could see it right away, but everyone else thought he looked pissed,” James had flashed one of those grins that would have made any other girl weak in the knees. The war had changed him, left him more gaunt and cold. James had grown colder every time that Peggy saw him, as if the snow and ice of the mountains were creeping into his heart, but even despite that, he was still a beautiful man. The office girls had always been quick to tell Peggy that, sighing that she got to talk to Captain America, Sergeant Barnes, _and_ Howard Stark.

How did a girl ever get to be so lucky?

Through years of hard work and through sheer bloody determination to scale every wall that had been thrown up in front of her, that’s how.

Howard Stark had sat through the rest of the briefing with the doll in his lap and had even brought her out drinking when he went out with the rest of the commandos later that night.

Steve had bought the commandos and Stark a few rounds before leaving, just like he’d always had. James had followed him out, just like he always did.

Peggy hadn’t thought that Howard would care that she had been able to kiss Steve. It always seemed like Howard was much more interested in his own trousers rather than anyone else’s dirty laundry, but then again… Howard had his own complicated mess of feelings to deal with when it came to the Commandos and the war even if he would never admit it aloud to Peggy.

“I did get to kiss him, yes.” Peggy would nod her head primly when Howard brought it up before suggesting that they focus their attention elsewhere. The world had not quieted simply because the war had ended. If anything, it had become more chaotic. Those fragile alliances made to ensure survival were falling apart. There were new weapons in the world that could destroy every single person on this planet if they were misused, and all the ugliness of the war had been magnified.

Everyone had made their share of mistakes in the war. If they could be called mistakes. The internment of the Japanese out of prejudice, the genocide of the Jewish people out of hate; and now there was a growing fear that couldn’t be quelled. Little aberrations were sought out and reported. Spies could be everywhere, people thought, as the world’s two greatest superpowers stared each other down from across the ocean.

“Peg.”

Howard’s voice had Peggy snapping her head up from where she’d been buried in her reports. Their new offices for SHIELD had their own laboratory space, but when the day was over and the labs emptied out, Howard liked to come up to Peggy’s office while he tinkered. Already, Peggy’s mind had strayed from what she’d originally meant to talk to Howard about. “You know you’ll regret it if you don’t go.”

Peggy’s lips pursed into a thin line and there was this small, childish voice in the back of her mind that wanted to resist doing what Howard said simply because he’d said to do it. There were so many people who were pushing her around those days or at the very least, trying to.

“I’ll go when I have time,” Peggy promised, but she’d begun drafting her letter as soon as she made it back to her apartment.

Mrs. Barnes and her daughter had been surprised by the visit. There was no denying that, but there was a grace that Peggy hadn’t expected. James had always hidden how much he cared by seeming carefree, but Mrs. Barnes wore her worries on her sleeve. Rebecca made tea for the three of them, reaching out to touch her mother’s arm in an unconscious attempt at comfort that made Peggy smile. “James wrote us about you,” Winnifred said, sipping her tea before setting it back down in its saucer. Her hand trembled, making the china clink loudly. “He said that you were Steve’s girl.”

“Oh, we were never official.” Peggy shook her head even as her heart warmed at the words, a faint blush tinging her cheeks. “There was so much going on that we never had the time…”

Peggy trailed off, looking up at Winifred’s kindly face and blinked back the tears that she hadn’t expected. “I wish we’d had the time, but I’m glad that if Steve and James had to be on the battlefield that they were together.”

Winifred nodded and Peggy thought she caught a flash of a very different expression across Rebecca’s face, but then it was gone. “James said that you were the one thing that made Steve happy.”

“Sergeant Barnes never gave himself enough credit.” Peggy said, sipping delicately at her teacup to steal a moment to compose herself. “His friendship was essential to Captain Rogers and…” Again, Peggy trailed off, managing a smile despite the turmoil of emotions that were running through her mind. “They were both good men. Ones who we may never see the like of again.”

There were tears in Rebecca’s eyes that she wiped away with a handkerchief before moving to pour everyone else another cup of tea. “I’m sorry that it took me so long to come visit,” Peggy said once it was just her and Mrs. Barnes. “I thought about it so many times, but it took time to work up the courage.”

“Why is that dear?” Winifred asked and Rebecca returned to the table with little cookies in a tin.

“Being here means that they’re really dead, Ma.” Rebecca said and Winifred frowned at her daughter, shooing her away so that there was only Peggy and her left in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s come over her…”

“She’s right.” Peggy was proud of how steady her voice was. “I never got to see either of them much during the war so it can be easy to pretend that they’re just on another mission. That I’ll watch the war reels and see new updates about them there, or hear about them in the news. But I can’t do that here.”

“You’ve got to let yourself grieve, dear.” Winifred said, reaching out to take Peggy’s hands into her own. “Otherwise it will eat you alive.”

It already has, Peggy thought to herself, swallowing down her bitterness and her tears.

Peggy prided herself on her strength; she knew that she would keep moving forward, that she wouldn’t give up. She had friends, good ones who cared about her. Peggy owed it to all those people who had died in the war to keep on living past it, but there was one question that would come into her mind late at night, long after she should have been asleep.

How could you put yourself back together like you’d been before?

* * * * *

There were ghosts in the graveyards, Steve thought.

No spooks or scares to be found, no rattling chains to hear, or ethereal people to see, but there were ghosts all the same. Steve could feel it in the quiet hush of the air. There just wasn’t anyone talking above a whisper as they had their private conversations with their dead, and maybe that was why he hadn’t spoken to Peggy since he’d stepped onto the grounds.

She would be patient with him, Steve knew. Peg had always been patient with him when it mattered.

The gravestone seemed out of place, too cold to be representative of the person it was meant for. The years had smoothed away the sharp edges, but the words were still legible. The stone detailed years of service without any hint of the humour that had made Bucky who he was.

“His mother, Winifred, and I were the ones who wanted to have graves. Even empty graves.” Peggy’s voice was soft enough that Steve crouched down beside her wheelchair so he could be closer to her. “I think it added some finality to everything. Even if there’s no body in the ground, a gravestone makes things quite final.”

“You put us side by side,” Steve said, glancing over at his own, just as serious gravestone, and Peggy’s smile was haunted by shadows and ghosts.

“What was it they said in your exhibit? ‘Inseparable on the playground and on the battlefield’? Why should death have been any different?”

Steve looked away at the rush of feeling, closing his eyes for a moment, before he looked over at Peggy and took her hand into his. “Thank you,” he said, his voice low and Peggy gave his hand a squeeze.

Today was a good day for her, a lucid day, and her eyes were as clear as Steve had ever seen them. Her smiles were small now, no longer brilliant, but Steve wasn’t sure if it was time that had stolen them away or his return. Regrets latched onto people, sank their teeth in, and made it hard to breathe.

“I wish I’d made it back for that dance.”

“I think a part of me always knew that you wouldn’t.” Peggy laughed when Steve jerked his head toward her in surprise. “You were and are a stubborn man, Steve. Careful and reckless all wrapped up into one, but you were never more reckless with anything than you were with your own life.” Peggy let out another little chuckle, settling into her wheelchair more. “If we’d had any sense, we wouldn’t have waited until the end of the war for our dance.”

“That night in the bar...”

“There were many bars.”

“It was after I’d been given the go-ahead to form the commandos. Me and Bucky were talking by the bar and you’d come over, do you remember?” Steve could still picture it vividly. The bright red of the dress burned into his mind, forever changing the way that he thought about Peggy. It had been easy to use their uniforms as a barrier between the two of them.

No, she wasn’t interested, Steve had told himself time and time again. Why would she be interested in someone like him? The uniforms had made it easy to believe that. They were both just being pleasant and doing their jobs, Steve would tell himself, something that Bucky had laughed at him for when he’d told him later.

But in that red dress, well there was no denying anything then, was there?

“Oh that night?” Peggy’s smile was warm and she gave Steve’s hand another squeeze, holding on tight. “The night I grew tired with dropping hints and decided to be very clear with my intentions.”

“It was certainly that.” Steve laughed with her, squeezing her hand right back before he stood up again. Peggy had wanted to show him the graves, the way that Winifred and she had tried to memorialize the people they’d lost too soon. “So direct I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

“I’m sure that James could have told you.”

“He did.” Steve’s smile grew shadowed, crooked as he remembered the conversation that they’d had all those years ago. “He said I was an idiot for letting you walk out of that bar.”

“He certainly wouldn’t have let me go if he were in your place,” Peggy said and she squeezed Steve’s hand one more time before letting go.

“No, he wouldn’t have.” Steve said and he hesitated for a moment, long enough for Peggy to touch his arm to break the silence. “Do you ever…”

“Yes,” Peggy shook her head without letting him finish his question. “I’ve had years to have every regret that you could think of.”

“Sorry,” Steve ducked his head and let out a huff of breath that could have been a laugh. “Things’ll just come to me sometime. Out of nowhere.”

“Memories are funny like that.” There was some of the crispness to Peggy’s tone that Steve remembered so well, but the years had softened some of that edge. “But let’s not dwell in the past, Steve. Not when the present has given us this chance to see each other again.”

Steve stepped behind her to push her wheelchair along. The hospital had been strict about the amount of time that they would allow her to be outside, and Steve had the feeling that the only reason they were bending these rules at all were because of who he was. There was a nurse waiting by the cemetery gate, surreptitiously checking his phone as he waited for Steve and Peggy to finish.

They walked in silence, with Peggy adjusting her shawl to keep herself warm even though the sun was shining brightly and autumn had only just begun. She was so much smaller now than Steve remembered, but there were moments when the years fell away and he could forget the marks that time had left on them.

“Do you still dance?”

Peggy’s smile was small, her laugh barely audible, but they were there.

“Like a dream.”

Long after Peggy had been returned to her nursing home, Steve could still feel her presence echoing around him. He kept thinking that he would blink and there she would be, looking just like he’d had before he’d gone beneath the ice. It had been worse when he’d first woken up. Being around Peggy had been a sweet torture that the few people he talked to had tried to warn Steve away from. It couldn’t be healthy, they’d say, to hurt yourself like that. Steve should give himself a break, they’d argue.

But when had the good things in life ever come easy?

Sam had taken one glance at Steve when he’d entered the library of the Avenger’s Complex and just kept quiet, grabbing a book and settling down in one of the large couches that Tony had provided. “I know you wanna ask,” Steve said after Sam had been silent for nearly ten minutes. “So ask.”

“How’s she doing?” Sam asked and Steve shrugged his shoulders, moving to the bookshelf and picking out one at random, holding it in his hands rather than starting to read it.

“Today was a good day.”

There had been so much that he wanted to say to Peggy, but this wasn’t the place for that, not any longer. The world had changed and while Peggy was still a part of Steve’s world, she couldn’t be the heart of it any more than Bucky could be. They were from different generations now, hard as it was to believe, and all Steve wanted to talk to her about was the past. She was one of the few links he had to his past, one of the few people still around who had been there in the thick of it with Steve. What had she done after the war? What had her life been like?

And more importantly, had she found that peace within herself that all of them had been searching for?

The war never went away. Steve could pretend that it did all he wanted, but it never truly left him. Him and Bucky, they’d been forged in the crucibles of those battlefields, and the person Steve was today was at odds with the person he had been then. It was easier to fall into line, to not question the whys and the hows. He’d been given targets by the Colonel and he’d met them, but then the goal had been obvious. Destroy Hydra. These days… the world was such an interwoven complex mess that simple just didn’t get anything done.

“You don’t seem happy about it.”

“It’s not that I’m not happy.” Steve shook his head. He knew that much, at least, was true. To be able to see Peggy again was a blessing even if he didn’t always know how he felt about it. That she was alive and that the world had allowed them to see each other even after everything it had thrown at them, it was a miracle. “I’m… well, I’m not happy, but it’s not because of Peggy.”

Things had been a little easier lately. Ever since the news had come in that Bucky was alive and that they were going to be trying to find him, nothing else had mattered. The fact that SHIELD had been shut down, the way that the Avengers operated now, all of that had been background noise. It took its turn in the spotlight briefly, but then the search for Steve’s lost friend would take over again. “You probably need a break. I know I could use one.”

Steve shot Sam a grin at the other man’s words, placing the book that he was holding down on the table without even glancing at the title. “No one’s stopping you from grabbing a little vacation.”

“Oh, I’d never hear the end of it. You think Natasha would just shrug her shoulders and say ‘Well, everyone needs a break so I think it’s good Sam took some time off’?”

“I think she’d say whatever she could to get a rise out of you,” Steve laughed and sat on the edge of the table. The room was a small one, devoted just to the search for Bucky, although it was an unofficial designation. No one had suddenly cordoned the room off, but that was what it had become, and Steve was thankful for it. “If that means teasing you for not pulling your weight, then that’s what she’ll do.”

Sam let out a grumble, and Steve couldn’t stop himself from laughing again despite his best efforts. “Just be thankful you’ve never been out with both Clint and Natasha at the same time.”

There were moments when the past would bleed into the present. When Clint would say something and Steve would feel like he was back in Europe, standing on blood soaked battlefields and facing down Hydra tanks. There were times when a bit of Russian would slip into Natasha’s accent and Steve would be thinking of those bitter winters where they’d fought alongside the Russian troops to defeat the Hydra bases that had been hidden in the snowy mountains.

The world would fall out of orbit, time slowing to a crawl and then Steve would blink and it would all come snapping back into place.

“Do we have a lead?” Sam glanced up when Steve broke the silence, and he nodded, spreading out a map of the United States across one of the tables. “For the most part he’s been keeping to this same general area. There’s Hydra all over the damn country, but all the incidents have been happening in and around New York State which means even though he’s running and hiding, he’s not running very far.”

“There were some that were as far West as California,” Steve said and pointed at one of the dots on the map, but Sam shook his head. “It’s an outlier, but it’s still there. What’s the connection? Everyone who’s been killed or taken out has had a direct affiliation with Hydra. These aren’t people who are working for Hydra by accident, but people who would have been directly involved.”

“So he’s finishing up your old mission? Wipe Hydra off the face of the Earth?”

“Hard to say,” Steve tilted his head and looked at the maps for a long moment. “I don’t know what he can remember or what’s going through his head right now. It might be all in self-defense.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of defending.” Sam began, trailing off when he saw the look on Steve’s face. “But sure, it might be all in self-defense. Either way, Tony thinks he’s found a pattern in it.”

The thought of being able to find Bucky again had Steve’s chest feeling too tight. It was like before the serum all over again when those pangs and pains had been commonplace. When they were younger, Bucky had done his best to take care of Steve. They’d been kids, but Bucky had tried to baby him just the same. Ever since that winter when he’d almost died, Steve thought as he looked out the window. Well, the first winter that Bucky had been around when he’d almost died.

The SHIELD files had given up plenty on the Winter Soldier and there was a following online who’d packaged it all together to hand over to the media. Steve could still remember the anger that’d surged through him when he first saw the headlines. Hyperbolic shit, all of ‘em, with Bucky’s struggles front and center. The press seemed to take a perverse kind of glee in how many people Bucky had killed, skimming over the conditioning techniques that had been used on him to call up his body count.

It’s a hell of a lot higher than that, Steve had thought to himself when he first saw the news break. They hadn’t counted the war.

But no one cared about how many people you killed when you were working for them. And no one cared about the reasons why you’d work for the other side.

At first, the fact that other people had been going through the data and sorting it out was a blessing in disguise. There was so much that had been in that data dump and to have other people helping Steve, Tony, and Sam to pull it all together had been a godsend. At least until the media had sunk their talons into the story, tearing Bucky apart. There was this idea that no matter what, death should come before submission.

The disgraced hero made for a good story and people were just lapping it up.

It had always been that way, Peggy had told Steve soon after he was defrosted, in one of those first meetings. “Did you know they branded Howard as a traitor?” There was a lightness to her tone that only came with the decades that had passed. “The papers screamed about treason and that perhaps he’d been working with the wrong side all along.”

The thought made Steve’s blood boil and even though he’d done his best to keep it from showing on his face, Peggy had smiled at him and taken his hand into hers. “It was a long time ago,” she murmured and he shook his head, not wanting to hear any excuses she might have had for the way that the world had treated the people who had been in the war. “They wanted me to be a secretary for them. To file papers and get them coffee.”

“Did you?”

“When I had to,” Peggy’s voice was soft and she shook her head. “Then I would go undercover and find the weapons before they could with a little finesse.”

Steve had smiled, picturing that. Peggy’s life was full of stories of intrigue and of loss. He’d held her hand when she’d talked about her friend, a roommate she had only known a few months, but who had been kind to her.

“We were supposed to go to the movies,” she’d said, her eyes taking on that faraway look.

And we were supposed to get that dance, Steve thought, but he said nothing.

The world had changed when he went under the ice or maybe the veils had just been pulled from Steve’s eyes. He could see the ugliness so clearly now. The bullies that he’d fought against before were no longer so clearly defined. Anyone could be one if they were frightened enough, misinformed enough, and what Steve had come to realize was that the people who worked for Hydra hadn’t assumed that they were doing evil. Even Pierce, knowing that he’d done terrible things, hadn’t considered himself to be evil.

It was all toward a greater good, a future that they believed in so fervently that the ends justified any means. Steve had read files where it said that dissent that was the poison within the ranks of the human mind, free will which let so many people slump into slothful lives, barely awake. The human race could be perfect, Hydra seemed to think, once the contaminants were removed from the gene pool.

A hand on his shoulder pulled Steve from his reverie and he turned his head to see Natasha standing in front of him with a small smile playing on her lips. Following her gaze, Steve saw the heavy hand on his shoulder, scarred knuckles with new bruising and a bandage wrapped around two of the fingers. “Hey Clint,” Steve signed without turning around and there was a disappointed sigh behind him.

“How’d you tell?”

They’d come a long way since Clint had come chasing after him when SHIELD had been told that Steve was a traitor. Clint had been one of the first people to track Steve and Natasha down, arrow drawn and aimed at Steve’s heart. “I gotta bring you in, Cap.” He’d said, his mouth tightening into a thin line as he let his arrow fly four feet wide of where Steve was standing. He’d winced, but not tried to dodge when Steve dashed forward to knock him out.

“The bandages,” Steve said aloud, his fingers translating the words in case Clint couldn’t hear him clearly.

“Tony gets hurt too,” Clint grumbled, his hand falling away as Steve turned so he could see both of them at once.

“Tony would’ve said something long before he got close enough to touch me.” Steve signed to the two of them and managed a grin. It took him a moment to shake the past from his thoughts so he could look the two of them over. “Fun mission?”

“It was a blast,” Natasha’s smile widened as she spoke and signed the word. Clint rolled his eyes before they moved over to the couch to take a seat. Clint sprawled down on it first, taking up more than half of it and rather than shove at him, Natasha had simply sat down with her legs on Clint’s lap. “You missed a good time.”

“I’m sure I did,” Steve chuckled before turning one of the chairs backward and sitting on it with his elbows resting on top of the chair back so he could keep signing.. “Anything to report?”

“Tons. You missed some Shakespeare-worthy stories in debriefing,” Clint said and when Steve raised an eyebrow at him, he shook his head. “But there was an anecdote or two that we saved just for you.” Clint rubbed his hands together, heedless of the bandage and leaned back on the couch. “Real good stuff.”

“We found evidence that Hydra is sending retrieval teams after Barnes.” Natasha cut in, holding her hands up so Clint couldn’t miss what she was saying and smiling sweetly at Clint when he shot her a wounded look. Her expression completely innocent, Natasha ignored the way that Clint pressed a hand against his heart and the grumbling he was doing under his breath.

“Past tense?” Steve gave up signing when it got too complex and Natasha took over for him, her hands immediately falling into the movements.

“Well yeah.” Realizing that his antics weren’t working, Clint became serious. “Lose enough people trying to get your weapon back and the plan changes from retrieval to ‘if we can’t have it, no one will’.”

“Did you find out where he was last?”

Clint’s smile was crooked and he glanced over at both Sam and Natasha before he looked back at Steve.

“He really needs to get himself a better travel agent.” Clint made a disapproving sound with his tongue and Natasha pinched his shoulder lightly as she brushed past him, flashing him that secret smile that only Clint ever got to have. “Of all the places he could go, he ended up in Detroit.”

* * * * *

There were times when the soldier would blink and forget that he was in the future at all. The feeling would come on so strongly that the breath was stolen from his lungs and all he could do was scramble to pull his mind back into the present. There’d be a familiar smell or the sound of a train and the past would come rushing back, knocking him off of his feet and drowning him beneath its waves.

It was never anything solid.

The images in his mind were hazy, blurred. There were colours and distorted sounds, memories of warmth and a laugh that might have been his own. The soldier couldn’t pull the threads apart, couldn’t figure out which he was looking at. The worst was when there would simply be this sense of ease.

He would be walking and it would hit him that something, something here was familiar, but at the same time, it was wrong.

And the soldier would never have been able to tell you why.

Bucky. Bucky was the name that the Captain had called him. It had rung true enough when they were fighting on the helicarrier, but when the soldier repeated it to himself now, it sounded off. James and Barnes didn’t sound any better, but then the soldier had never had a strong reaction to either name. But Bucky…

Bucky was a name that had made the ground crumble beneath his feet.

The soldier moved through the town, noticing the dilapidated buildings, the broken windows, and grass pushing its way through the sidewalk. The decay was a strange comfort to him, something that the soldier could understand. He was falling apart minute by minute, just like these buildings and the cracked sidewalks in front of them. Without maintenance, without upkeep then things would fall apart.

And when that happened, there was nothing that could be done aside from bulldozing the whole damn thing to the ground to start over.

The soldier didn’t know how many times he’d had his mind wiped. All of the memories that should have been stored in there were probably gone, leaving only vague traces where they’d once been.

Standing in that museum, the soldier had read about the life of Captain America and his faithful sidekick, James Buchanan Barnes. He’d read about the close friendship they’d shared and how tragic it had been when Barnes had died. The Captain had been devastated. That was one of the words that the soldier had read, not in the exhibit, but in an article online.

The Captain had been devastated by the loss of his friend.

Devastated enough to refuse to lose him again. Devastated enough to let that friend beat him to death if that’s what it took.

The soldier looked down at his gloved hand, flexing metal fingers beneath the leather. The world wasn’t any quieter now that Hydra had fallen. The world was a cacophony of sound, of jangling screeches and buzzing phones, of squealing brakes and shouted curses. The future was so loud that it would be enough to make anyone’s head split in two, but the soldier had learned to adapt to that quickly.

No one had really spoken to him since the Captain had thrown his shield down.

The silence was eerie. No reports were required of him, but the soldier went through the details regardless.

Armed hostile dragged a young woman into an alleyway. Used non-lethal force. Broke his arm in two.

And the target? The soldier could almost hear Pierce’s voice in his head still, stern enough to stiffen the soldier’s spine so he stood at attention.

The target was not terminated.

There was a difference in tone when Pierce was unhappy with performance, different from the others who had handled him before. There were some who would bluster at him, rant and rail about the incompetence of a weapon who wasn’t allowed to think for itself. Other handlers would be cold, frustrated in the way that someone would be for a piece of technology that wasn’t working as it was meant to.

Pierce though, Pierce would let disappointment leak into his tone. It would seep into his words, leaving the soldier disoriented and confused. Hot and cold, soft and hard, Pierce never allowed the soldier to find a pattern and there was no bracing for anything that the man would have wanted to do to him. The beatings were more sudden, sharper, more painful because they weren’t routine.

The soft tone would have the soldier tensing up more than the sharp one would.

The reports would be warped in his mind, fed back to him.

The man on the bridge, who was he?

They had always known, and the soldier had known too.

They had tried to convince him otherwise, and he’d let them.

Why? Why? Because it was easier. Even now, even knowing that Pierce was dead, the soldier could hear him whispering in his ear. There was never any true affection there - the soldier wasn’t stupid enough to believe that, and Pierce never touched him like a human would be touched. It was a sharp slap. An attempt to jar the proper response out of the soldier much in the way that the soldier had seen others kick at cars that stopped working or smack computers that were freezing. That was the extent of Pierce’s touches.

There was a body in the room beside him. The soldier blinked, frowned, looked down at the corpse that was still propped up in the corner. The smell was everywhere and while he would have found it overwhelming once, the soldier had long since become accustomed to the smell of death and the taste of it on his tongue. The man who had been here was unlucky, the soldier thought to himself and quickly searched for identification. There wasn’t anything to tie him back to Hydra, but the fact that he’d come through the window, speaking to the soldier in Russian had been enough.

“Don’t you want to come home, Soldat?”

The soldier had thrown the knife so hard that it had knocked the man to the floor. It was as if it had just appeared, blooming like a flower among a field of red. Blink and anyone could miss it. The man hadn’t even had the chance to be surprised, but that hardly mattered to the soldier as he took what he needed from the corpse. There was a little bit of money, a small billfold that would let him buy more gas for the bike that he had stolen.

“Home is for people,” the soldier said in Russian, slipping into the language more easily these days than the English which he’d been told was his mother tongue.

Not for weapons.

He jerked the knife clean, ignoring the way it scraped against bone before he wiped it off on the man’s shirt. They would be coming for him again, sooner rather than later, and if a part of the soldier railed against the violence, he couldn’t hear that part any longer. There were conflicting missions in his head, but one rang louder than all the rest of them.

Protect him.

With what?

With everything you got.

There was only two things that the soldier had: his skills at taking lives and the life that he was still somehow holding onto. But for now, running was the best option. The soldier needed time to regroup, to clear his head, and the world was just not giving him that. He ran until his body forced him to sleep, fitful hours spent leaning against the corner of the wall behind barricaded doors.

They would never stop hunting him, the soldier thought, and then shrugged the thought away, unbothered.

Stairways were noisy places, and the soldier could hear the echos of his boots against the stairs even after he had stopped moving. Then, he frowned. . He kept his gun in one hand, his knife in the other as he took a moment to catch his breath, unsure of what to make of what was running through his head.

“Bucky.”

The soldier didn’t lift his head at first, he’d heard that name so many times, and looked around just to see that there was no one there. Bucky was the ghost, and the soldier looked down as if to ensure that the ground was still solid beneath his feet before he raised his gaze. The Captain was standing there.

He’d stood there before. The soldier had seen him, but the uniform was different from how it normally looked, the colours muted, the design streamlined. The Captain wore his helmet, and if it weren’t for the shield and the blue eyes behind the mask, the soldier might have mistaken him for someone different...

No, he never would have.

The soldier looked up, raised his gun and fired off a shot. The Captain raised his shield, blocking it easily.

“Bucky… It’s me.”

There it went, the tremors beneath his feet and the soldier felt dizzy despite himself as he took one step back. “No,” the soldier said instead, holstering the gun and using the knife instead. He flipped the knife to his left hand, drawing the tip of it down his right palm to make a shallow cut.

Pain was enough to shoot up his arm and the soldier squeezed his hand into a fist, looking up at the Captain. Normally, the soldier would have been alone after that, but the Captain was still there, halted in place with his shield ready to throw.

The soldier turned on his heel, lunging to the left for the shield throw that never came. Instead there was the sound of footsteps and the soldier ran. Ran as fast and hard as he could.

There had been a boy once who’d never run from a fight. The soldier had heard the stories, but he knew that he’d never been that boy. There were so many more things that the soldier could have been, but instead he’d become a ghost. Ghosts could run, they could kill, they could disappear.

If only one let them.

He’d nearly made it to the car he’d taken from a gas station a week ago. There was maybe ten feet between the soldier and the car when his name was called again. The soldier turned, staring the Captain in the eye with his gun pointed at the man’s heart. A head shot would be cleaner, the soldier knew, but even with aim as good as his, the odds were against a difficult shot when it came to facing down the Captain. “Stop,” the soldier said and the Captain did what he asked, skidding to a halt and raising his hands with the shield still held in one of them.

“I just want to help,” the Captain said, and he moved to slot his shield onto his back, fast enough that the soldier fired a warning shot at the Captain’s feet. “Easy Buck…” The Captain edged forward a step, only to stop when the soldier barked out a short warning in Russian. “I can help you get your memories back.”

The soldier eyed the man for a long moment, but he didn’t give an inch. Perhaps the Captain’s friend would have jumped at the chance, but the soldier simply stared.

“The war’s over, Bucky.”

Had it ever been? What was the war anyway to the soldier? It wasn’t his war or maybe it had been, but whatever the war had been, it wasn’t over for him and the soldier didn’t think that it ever would be. Even if he were to magically find a way to stop, no one would let him. The Captain said his name again and the soldier suppressed the urge to flinch, firing another shot at the Captain’s feet.

There were words that he wanted to say, the soldier could feel them rising in his throat even as he tried to swallow them back down. Whoever he was, whoever he’d been, the soldier wasn’t even sure that he wanted to be that person any more.

Being around the Captain made him want to claw at his skin as if there was something there, burrowing through him without end.

“Stop.” The soldier said again and there was something in his voice that had the Captain’s expression changing. A crack, a hoarse little croak that served no one and was a discredit to the weapon that the soldier had been born to be.

“Why?”

There were a million answers that the soldier could give and at the same time there were none at all. Not a single one that he could use to explain what was happening inside of his mind and it’s only when he hear’s a car horn from two streets away that the soldier remembers that the world existed. It snapped back into focus quickly enough to make him reel, but he held himself steady and looked at the Captain with an expression that was cold enough to burn.

“Did you kill that man?” Steve’s voice was soft, but there was a hard edge to it that had the soldier’s skin crawling again.

The Captain had found him and without knowing why, exactly, the soldier knew that the Captain wasn’t going to let him just walk out of here. The soldier would be taken to whatever remained of SHIELD, he would be put into a laboratory and prodded again. Or he could end this here. Kill the Captain or try to find a way to coerce the Captain into killing him.

The soldier gestured with his gun and as his mind overflowed with options, he chose the one that seemed the most rational.

If nothing else, travelling together would allow the soldier more time to think. “Get in,” he pointed at the car and the Captain looked surprised, watching him. There was a long moment where the two of them stared at each other as if sizing each other up before the soldier shrugged, turning his back to the Captain and sliding into the driver’s seat. This could be an ending, he knew. The Captain held the power to end all of this with the soldier unable to kill him and although his face remained impassive, there was a flicker of surprise inwardly that he hadn’t been shot in the back.The soldier started the engine and began to drive away, unsurprised when the Captain ran to catch up with the car and somehow managed to fold himself into the passenger’s seat with a surprising amount of grace. “So where are we going?”

“Away from here,” the soldier shrugged, wondering in the back of his mind if he could outpace all the thoughts in his head if he ran far enough.

“Why?”

“It’s not a good area,” the soldier said, letting his mind slip into autopilot. “I heard someone got shot.”

The Captain let out a laugh that sounded a little bit like death.

The soldier didn’t smile.

* * * * *

There were moments of clarity.

Brief flashes of times when he knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. The soldier could never put his finger on what it meant or what it felt like. To him, the memories in his head were elusive, a dream that fled upon waking except the waking was the nightmare. There was pain in the past, that much he knew, but the soldier didn’t shy away from the pain of things. It was the good memories that he was much more worried about getting back.

Life was shit.

The soldier had no illusions about the kind of life that he deserved, and life hadn’t disappointed him. There were people everywhere, people who would mill around and go about their daily lives, but the soldier was outside of them. Had he been with them once? The people who could live in these houses and walk around on the streets without the grim sense of purpose that the soldier had learned to live for. It was hard to tell. He didn’t know.

The line between civilian and killer was a line that the soldier didn’t know how to walk and that the Captain seemed to straddle.

The museum had been unenlightening. Oh, the soldier had learned about the stories and the legends. He had learned about the heroics of the Captain and the commandos, but they were just that, simply stories. It did less to make the soldier feel like he had been a part of those historic moments and more like he’d killed the Captain’s best friend to crawl inside his skin.

Most of the time, it was manageable, but then the Captain would look at him in a way that would have the soldier’s skin crawling. There were volumes spoken in those looks, but the soldier couldn’t read the language. All he knew was that the Captain wanted his friend back and that he wasn’t there. Everything that had made Barnes who he was had been scooped out and replaced with metal and gears.

“Where are we going?” The Captain asked after they had been driving for nearly an hour, the last light of the day disappearing behind the horizon. He let out a huff of breath when the soldier didn’t answer and then tried again. “Are you going to kill more people?”

The soldier had never had to quantify it before. There were so many words for the endings that the soldier had doled out that he’d never had to stop and think about. Kill was a simple word, fitting of the work that soldier did. Murder had too much weight behind it. There had to be a care, a connection, some shred of humanity for murder and the soldier felt none of it. Just as no one murdered a car, no one he ended was murdered.

The Captain let the silence stretch out between the two of them for nearly another minute or so before he said that name. That name that screeched across the tracks of the soldier’s mind and set his skin crawling anew.

“Depends on if they get in my way.” The soldier said finally and then, knowing somehow that the Captain wouldn’t leave it at that, he fell silent. Let the Captain direct the conversation and ask his questions; the soldier felt more lost than he could ever remember being.

“I might have to stop you.” The Captain said instead, so quietly that at first the soldier wasn’t sure that he heard him correctly.

“Try.”

The Captain fell quiet again, studying the road that stretched out into the horizon and then disappeared. The soldier didn’t try to make conversation or even do something to break the silence like turn on the radio. The skin that he was wearing itched, burning him until the soldier wanted to claw at it. Instead, he drove until the Captain fell asleep. There was a familiar rhythm to the way that the man breathed, as if it was a song that the soldier had heard before, a soft tempo winding its way through his brain.

The museum had said that they grew up together. They had called him the Captain’s best friend and all the soldier had been able to see was a constant. A constant companion, a constant friend. The soldier wasn’t the man in the museum. He wasn’t the man who smiled in the videos that the museum had projected on the wall, and for some reason, the soldier felt like maybe he had never been that man.

The road stretched on, mile after mile, and the soldier only stopped for gas. This late at night, no one paid close attention to who was at the pumps. The soldier pulled out the cash from a stolen wallet, counted out the bills, and feeling uneasy, he headed back to the car.

The Captain was awake and looking at him.

“Gas?” He asked, and the soldier nodded his head before wordlessly getting into the car and starting it up again. “I can take a shift at the wheel if you want.”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“You’re right,” the Captain agreed as the soldier pulled out onto the freeway, merging in with the other lanes of traffic easily. “How much do you remember?”

The question came out of nowhere, and if it surprised the soldier, the only sign he let show was the slight tightening of his hand on the wheel. There were dreams and vague remnants of emotions, the soldier wanted to say, but it was easier to say nothing and just drive. Answers only brought more questions, and the soldier was already tired of them.

Already he was beginning to question why he’d let the Captain into the car in the first place, but try as he might, the soldier still couldn’t think of a better option.

“Bucky?”

Enough, the soldier thought. He remembered enough to not be able to kill the man who sat beside him, the man who had done nothing but talk about his friend who had died back in the war. Enough to have him dive down into the water to save someone, but not enough for him to stay.

The soldier shrugged his shoulders and the Captain, sighed before turning his head to look out the window.

Neither of them attempted to fight it as the silence swallowed them whole.

* * * * *

They pulled into the parking lot of an old motel, so beat up that Steve felt like it belonged in the same time period that he and Bucky did. Steve glanced at the building that had seen better days and then over at Bucky. They had been quiet all day and Steve shrugged his shoulders, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling out the new phone that he’d bought earlier.

It had been Tony’s idea for him to get a new phone. Tony had even gone out and bought it for Steve himself, or at least, had picked out the model to have ordered for him. It was almost therapeutic to have something so new, Steve thought to himself as he peeled the transparent plastic covers off of the side of the phone.

Steve had done his reading. In those longer nights when sleep just refused to come, it felt like reading was all he could do. Thankfully, the internet had been willing to oblige him. What had started out as aimless browsing through news sites and listicles had gradually brought him back to the greatest source of information that the modern age seemed to have: Wikipedia.

Steve would spend hours opening up tabs and eventually, his head crammed full of knowledge that he would probably never need, he would fall asleep on his bed curled up beside his Stark tablet.

When the articles became more technical, most of it was gibberish to Steve, but little ingots of information would stay with Steve. One of the more recent ones being that GPS tracking allowed people to be followed by their mobile phones. Bucky had watched him curiously as Steve took his phone apart, taking out the battery before snapping the back of the phone into place once more. “You don’t want anyone finding us, right?” Steve had said and Bucky, not feeling any more talkative than he had since Steve had first found him, had gone back to watching the road.

The phone was a heavy weight in his pocket right now, and Steve itched to turn it back on. He’d never been one to get excited by new technologies, but it was comforting to know that he could reach out and at his fingertips would be a way to connect to Sam and Natasha, Clint, Tony, and the others. To not have that option open to him or to not be able to open his phone to skim through an article left Steve feeling vaguely unsettled in a way that was more amusing to him than anything else.

Maybe this was why Howard Stark had always needed something to fiddle around with when it came to debriefings.

There was a notepad on the desk and a pen that took a few scribbles to have any ink flowing through it. Steve took the pen and paper into his hand, moving to sit on the bed so he could scribble aimlessly on it. It was nothing solid right now, just whorls and patterns that he would fill in if he had the time later. Bucky was checking the room for bugs, carefully looking around even though Steve argued that there was no way that anyone could have known they were coming here.

“Careless,” Bucky said and Steve shrugged his shoulders.

Careless was getting into a car with an assassin who had tried to kill you, best friend or not.

“Are you that worried about them finding you?” Steve asked and after a moment of hesitation, Bucky gave the slightest shake of his head. “Then what?”

Silence was an answer that Steve was beginning to get used to and when he didn’t hear anything, he sketched the room instead. To try and draw Bucky like it would have been too much, far too intimate for the world that they inhabited now. “We just going to keep going like this?”

Bucky shrugged, ducking into the bathroom and searching around it before he came out again. He was as restless as a caged animal and although Steve moved off the bed to sit down at the desk, he wasn’t surprised when Bucky didn’t move. The room was taking shape beneath Steve’s pen and he flipped to another piece of paper, a fresh one without any of the patterns on it to try and draw some more. Half an hour later, he looked up and Bucky was still in the same spot, staring at the bedspread as if it were going to come alive and bite him.

Steve raised an eyebrow at the other man, turning in his chair and as soon as he did so Bucky moved out of his field of view. When Steve turned again, Bucky moved again and his metal hand had reached out to grip the doorknob before Steve was able to close the distance between them. “Hey now,” he murmured, his voice soft and his grip on the other’s shoulder tight. “I thought we had an agreement.”

“I never agreed to it.”

The words were said with an almost petulant edge, but despite that, Bucky let go of the doorknob and moved back over to where he’d been standing before. The agreement had been painstaking to hash out and in the end, Steve still wasn’t sure that either of them had been able to get what they wanted from it. Steve had asked Bucky not to run and in return, Steve wouldn’t get in his way unless he had to.

The goal, it seemed, wasn’t to look for trouble, but to run away from it, and Steve wondered how much Bucky had been sleeping. There was a gauntness to his face that reminded Steve of the first time that he’d found Bucky in Europe, when the other man had been strapped to a table and barely lucid. “When was the last time you slept?”

Bucky looked at him with eyes as cold as his namesake, that same flat expression that Steve had been faced with when he faced down the Winter Soldier on the bridge of the Helicarrier, and Steve had to bite back a sigh. He didn’t know what was worse: when Bucky was like the assassin that they’d forced him to be, or those small pieces of personality that would shine through. A dry comment, a quirk of his lips, the slight lift of eyebrows… those little pieces of Bucky that were still buried beneath winter’s snow. Those little broken shards of a man that lodged in Steve’s chest whenever he found one of them.

“You need to sleep,” Steve said and when Bucky looked at him blankly, Steve set his jaw, ready for a fight. “Just pick a place that feels comfortable and lie down on it.”

Bucky had given no answer and Steve had turned away from him, rooting through the night stand beside the bed to find the bibles that always seemed to be in any of the hotels that he stayed in. He flipped through Genesis, skipping over the listings of family lineage, and just reading the stories that he’d learned as a boy. These, at least, had not changed and Steve let his mind drift. Another half hour passed, then an hour and by the time Steve looked up, Bucky was nowhere to be seen.

Steve found him in the bathroom, sitting on the cold tiles with his back against the wall facing the door. His eyes were closed, his breathing as close to peaceful as Steve had seen it since he’d found Bucky again.

Biting back anything that he might have wanted to say, Steve pulled the blanket from the bed and moved into the bathroom to drape it over Bucky’s legs. Bucky jerked awake, and Steve let the blanket drop, holding up his hands to show him that they were empty. “Easy there,” he began to say, his hands falling to his side when Bucky pushed the blanket away.

“I can’t,” Bucky’s voice was flat, but there was something in his eyes that stopped Steve from pressing the issue any further. He left Bucky there with the blanket tangled around his legs and sat just outside the bathroom with a blanket of his own, leaning against the opposite wall so Bucky would have to move past him to leave.

“Just like old times, huh.” Steve said under his breath and Bucky let out a sound that could have been amusement. “We would have killed for digs like this before.”

“I did kill.” Bucky said and Steve met his gaze for a long moment, a half smile on his lips that never reached Steve’s eyes.

“Yeah, Buck. Me too.”

* * * * *

**From:** Sender Unknown  
**To:** Azdaja

**Date:** Sep 2, 20XX at 3:02 PM  
**Subject:** 2 Corinthians 5:17

**Message:**

_Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature;_  
_the old things passed away; behold, new things have come._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> Chapter title and lyrics taken from [Remains by Bastille (vs. Rag'n'Bone Man & Skunk Anansie)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxx5CfeNg8)


	2. Soldier On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve never would have thought graveyards would be such good places for people who are still alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me.
> 
> Thanks also to [afadingoctober](http://afadingoctober.tumblr.com/) for meta.
> 
> (Updated Thursdays)

_No one will know  
When seasons cease to change and:  
How far we've gone  
How far we're going  
It's the here and the now  
And the love for the sound  
Of the moments that keep us moving_

The night went from too dark to see to blindingly bright and Steve raised his shield, ducking behind it as the first bomb went off. Even so, the force of the blast was enough to knock him off his feet and back through a plaster wall that cracked like drywall as he hurtled through it. Bucky was gone, blown back by the same explosion and Steve sent a small, instinctive prayer upward for the uniform that Stark had specially made for Steve. Tony had sworn up and down that it was fire resistant, but Steve had never had to put it to the test until now. 

He stumbled back onto his feet, eyes straining through the flickering light and the smoke to see anything, but the world spun around him and Steve went back down to one knee. There had been bombs before, but Steve had barely been able to prepare for this one and it had packed a punch. His ears ringing, Steve took a few precious seconds to orient himself and then he was up, throwing his shield at a black clothed operative who ran by. The shield let out what Steve knew had to be a loud clang when it went wide, but he could barely hear the sound and he cursed under his breath.

So this was his little taste of being Hawkeye, Steve thought. 

Then there was no time for him to think because Hydra was on him, their guns making a whining sound high pitched enough that Steve could still hear it as they powered up. He threw his shield again, diving out of the way of the first shot, and mentally thanking them for deciding to come closer. A bigger target was easier to hit and while it wasn’t a huge difference, every little bit counted. The first man went down, boneless as he hit the ground, and Steve turned to the operative who had been coming up behind him, catching his shield as he turned and slipping it over his arm as he used it to deal two quick blows, one shattering the operative’s knee.

She screamed as she went down and Steve winced, still instinctively reacting to female pain as he pushed himself up to his feet for the second time. The old abandoned metal shop that Bucky had chosen for them to stay at that night was going up quickly, years of chemical spills on the floor and old machinery were serving as accelerants and Steve shook his head to clear it. Bucky was somewhere in the flames, he thought and that thought alone had him calling out his friend’s name. 

Bucky was silent, nowhere to be seen, or maybe he’d suffered the same hearing damage that Steve had. He raced through the building, searching for Hydra operatives as he did. No metal arm? They went down. Steve couldn’t hesitate, not now. Even if that meant leaving the unconscious Hydra soldiers to the flames, even if that meant risking everything. There were sirens in the distance, and Steve craned his head upward to see if there was a sprinkler system that he could turn on. 

Nothing. 

Or if there was something, it was so rusted that it was indistinguishable from the ceiling. 

A flash of metal to his right caught Steve’s eye and he swung around with his shield, pulling the punch short when he saw who stood in front of him. Bucky didn’t flinch, didn’t bother to try and block the blow. He just looked at Steve up and down for a moment before cocking his head to one side to lead them out of the building. There were more operatives streaming in through the far door and the soldier looked at them the way that someone would look at a tiny obstacle that was in their way.

They opened fire and Steve was pushing Bucky down, both of them ducking behind one of the few pillars that was still standing. “I can’t really hear.” Steve called out, unsure if he was speaking loud enough for Bucky to hear him, but the other man nodded and checked the rounds left in his gun before snapping it back into place. Shots were being fired. Steve thought that he could hear the ricochets, and he felt off balance without his ability to hear. It had been years since he’d had to think about it. Not since he’d been the scrawny little punk in Brooklyn had his hearing been so bad.

There was a touch to Steve’s shoulder and Bucky tilted his head toward the office. It had been where they’d been planning to sleep tonight, easily the most defensible place considering the rest of the area was open. It had been the big windows that had left Steve feeling uncomfortable, but there was no point in worrying about that now. Bucky stood up, laying down covering fire as Steve threw his shield toward the glass that separated the office from the rest of the building. It splintered as the shield passed through it and Steve caught the shield as it bounced off the wall, strapping it to his arm and putting his weight behind it as he dove through the glass. 

Bucky was right beside him, tucking into a roll and when they were both back on their feet, they kept running. The building was going to blow, not because of explosives or accelerants, but because of air. It would have made Steve laugh once, the idea that air could be used as an explosive, but the air that was getting sucked into this inferno would cause the fire to flare any time now. This time, Bucky shot out the windows as they ran across the office and when they dove through, Steve shield first and Bucky with his metal arm protecting his face, the glass seemed to crumble beneath them. 

Bucky led the way, remembering where the car was and reaching down to drag Steve along with him. It didn’t matter that Steve was perfectly capable of keeping up, Bucky kept his grip on his arm anyway, and just as Steve had thought, the back draft from their exit from the building made the fire flare up as they ran. Hydra would be after them, Steve knew, and it was important that they get away before the— he stopped dead in his tracks.

Sirens in the distance meant fire trucks or police were coming, and if there were any Hydra operatives left by the time the response personnel got here, who was to say what would happen? Steve turned on his heel, cursing under his breath as he yanked his arm away from Bucky. There was a chance, Steve knew, that Bucky would just keep going and leave him behind. There was a chance that the winter soldier, fed up with having a tag-a-long would find the car and leave. They could leave together, allow the response personnel to fend for themselves, and hope that they were leading Hydra away. 

But for all those scenarios running through his mind, Steve knew that he couldn’t abandon people who were coming to help. 

“Sorry, Buck.” Steve murmured, casting one last glance at his friend before he sprinted back toward the building. His ears were still ringing, the rest of the world sounding far away even as he ran. The first Hydra operative that came at him fired off a shot that Steve blocked with his shield, lunging forward to strike the soldier on the underside of his jaw. If Steve had been able to hear, there was probably an audible click as the soldier’s jaw snapped shut and he fell to the ground.

The next operative ducked behind cover after firing their shots, and Steve was forced to dive behind cover of his own, scanning the area before deciding he’d have to face them head on. The shield had taken on a gatling gun; it would be able to withstand smaller caliber bullets, he thought, as he felt the force of the bullets bouncing off the shield. The next round went for his legs. It was a harder target and if Steve wasn’t protecting his torso with the shield, the Hydra agent probably never would have taken it. 

As it was, most of the shots missed, and the one that lodged itself in Steve’s thigh hit too late to stop him as he launched himself at the operative, tackling them to the ground. Two punches with his non-shield hand and the operative was out, and Steve looked around, trying to determine where he needed to go next.

By the time that the fire trucks got there, all fifteen operatives had been taken out and laid out a safe distance away from the building. One or two were still conscious, bound by their own belts, and Steve pulled the phone from his pouch, snapping the battery back into place and making a call. Tony wasn’t always Steve’s favourite person, but calling him or Maria was the easiest way to have a crew come dispose of Hydra agents. If they passed them onto SHIELD, Steve didn’t know, but if nothing else it put another layer between him and the organization that he’d once risked his life for. 

“Tony,” Steve said before the other man even had a chance to say anything, talking over him when his friend tried to talk. “Hydra set a metal shop on fire. Send someone by with a clean up crew.” 

He left the call connected, smirking as he imagined Tony’s indignant wisecracks as he let the other track him. After a minute and a half had elapsed, Steve took the battery out of the phone to slip it back into a pouch on his belt. That should have given Tony enough time, Steve thought, and he moved away from the fire and the sirens, heading toward where him and Bucky had stashed the car.

He half-expected to find the car gone, but it hadn’t been touched since they’d stashed it hours before. Bucky was nowhere to be found though, and Steve let out a sigh. He should have known that Bucky wouldn’t stick around. Not as he was now, anyway.

The car looked smaller than it had before, more forlorn, and Steve had been about to turn to walk the other way when a hand fell heavily on his shoulder. Steve tensed, ready to fight when he caught the gleam of metal out of the corner of his eye. “Bucky?” 

There was no answer, but Bucky moved until he was front of Steve, clearly visible, and then he spoke. Or, at least Steve thought he spoke, the ringing in his ears still too loud. He grinned a bit, laughing when Bucky gave him a shove toward the car. “I get it, I get it. I’m going.” He said, having to stifle another laugh when Bucky clapped a hand over his mouth. All the adrenaline and worry had drained away, leaving Steve feeling a little lightheaded like he usually did after missions. It would pass - it always did - but this was the first time he could remember grinning like an idiot after a mission. Or at least, the first time since the war.

“I thought you left,” he said when Bucky let go of his mouth, and Bucky simply shook his head, as if that fact weren’t obvious by the fact that he was still there behind Steve. He gave Steve another shove toward the car. 

They drove in silence. Bucky wasn’t that talkative anyway, and Steve couldn’t hear him properly even if he did speak. He listened to the ringing in his ears, dizzy and dozing in the passenger seat as they drove through the night. Bucky’s hands were steady on the wheel, and Steve let himself slump over, let himself close his eyes and drift.

Gradually the ringing gave way to the hum of the car, the sound of gears shifting, and the soft murmur of the radio as dawn broke, bringing light to the darkness.

* * * * *

Even if the soldier wouldn’t admit it to anybody, he still had dreams. 

The world would be different, the colors either too bright or completely washed out, and he would know that he was in a dream - for all the good that it did him. When the soldier did dream, he would wake with a jerk. Silent, as he had long-since learned to be, the soldier had woken up in a hotel washroom a couple days before and looked up to find that the Captain was sleeping against the wall across from the bathroom door. The man’s sleep was fitful as well, and the soldier wondered for the briefest of moments whether he dreamed of the friends that he had lost, the world that the two of them had left behind and that the soldier could only find fragments of. 

They had taken things from him. Hydra had stripped him down to the bone and remade him in their image, an unholy god with an unimaginable anger for the world that it could not control. 

Yuri, they’d called him once. The soldier could remember the life he had lived with Yuri more than he could remember anything as Barnes, even though Yuri’s life was a fiction. Yuri had been a hero just like Barnes, a man who had lost so much in the defense of his country that he had volunteered to become their weapon. Kill, kill, kill so the innocents wouldn’t have to die like his family had. 

The photos that his handlers had shown him were brutal, children murdered and a wife that Yuri could just barely remember strung up for the world to see. He wondered if he loved her like people were supposed to before pushing the thought away. She was a fiction and he was a ghost story - neither of them had ever truly existed, and yet Yuri was there, in the back of the soldier’s mind. He felt like a skin that the soldier could slip into more comfortably if he let himself, and the temptation was strong.

Yuri was steadier than Barnes had ever been, whatever the museum had to say about the steadfast friend of Captain America. Barnes, the legend of Bucky Barnes, depended on Captain America to survive, and the longer that the soldier was around the Captain, the more his skin would crawl. He’d become used to sitting with him, and there were times when the Captain was blessedly quiet. Like now, his eardrums damaged from being so close to that bomb, the Captain was sleeping in the car beside the soldier. 

The soldier expected that he would relax into the skin that he was wearing when the Captain couldn’t ask any of those probing questions, but instead of the peace that the soldier had been expecting, anger had filled the void instead. It had surged up so strong that he felt like he would choke on it. There was blood, blood that he hadn’t noticed before. Blood on the Captain’s cheek, on his knuckles, and blood on his leg that seeped through the Captain’s uniform and dripped down onto the seat of the car. 

A thigh wound was dangerous. 

If it had hit an artery, then super soldier or no, the Captain would have bled out by the time that the sun rose. Despite what he had seen on the helicarrier and the way that the Captain had fought his way through three bullet wounds, the soldier had half-expected to be driving around a corpse by the time first light came. What would he do if that happened? 

The soldier thought about dumping the body by the side of the road, but something inside of him seized at the thought, and he shook his head to clear it. A hospital then. He could take them there, and they’d take care of him. The soldier would be blamed, he would be hunted, but that simply meant fighting off more waves like they had faced tonight. 

Dawn was gathering over the horizon when the soldier looked back over at the Captain. The man’s face was peaceful when he slept, unmarked by the scars of the wars that he’d gone to sleep fighting and woken up to fight again. The soldier listened for a rasp of breath, listened for the rattle of lungs before giving his head a shake. The Captain’s lungs had never failed him like that, and instead the soldier reached out with his right hand to hold it an inch above the Captain’s mouth. It only took a moment to feel that first puff of air against his palm, and the soldier left his hand there for two more breaths before he pulled his hand back. 

So he was alive. 

The soldier wondered why the painful clenching of his chest had stopped before shrugging it off and going back to driving. There was a tightness in the back of his mind, a sharp pain that he had trouble ignoring, but the soldier pushed it away regardless. 

It had been worse before. 

The pain had never stopped and the soldier had become used to it, had become used to the way that his head would throb and the world would shift around him. He became used to the aches in arms and the failure for completing his missions, disconnected from the pain and the body that held all of those sensations. There was nothing else that could be done. They had kept him in a cage once, he could remember that. He hadn’t tried to escape although something told him that he’d tried before. 

Instead, the soldier had sat in the corner of the cage, letting his mind go. That was the one thing he had left that was his own. The mind was necessary for the missions, but when he was alone, he could just let it go. 

The soldier couldn’t ever be sure, but he felt like he was probably at his most content when he could cease to exist. 

The cell was tiny, not large enough for him to stretch his legs out in and if he wanted to stretch his legs, the soldier would have to stand up. The soldier didn’t understand why being in another metal prison felt so different to him or why it was harder for him to sit in this car than it had been for him to sit in that cell.

Or why it had been easier to sit in that cell than it had been for him to walk around before. The best of times had been when he’d gone under the ice. Each time, a death, the pain so intense that the soldier would pass out from it, but it had been a relief too. The fear was there, they couldn’t get rid of that no matter how hard they tried, but fear hadn’t stopped him from stepping into the container when they directed him to. It was slightly bigger than a coffin would have been, and the soldier would wait as they powered it up, watching the preparations they were taking to bury him again.

The fear would grow and grow, twisting in the pit of his stomach as they opened the container so the soldier could walk into it. He would stand up straight, letting the scientists fuss over him and when the time came, the soldier faced that tiny porthole of a window, reaching up to trace the glass as tiny fractals of ice swept over him. Breathe in and he was still of this world. Breathe out and he was gone. 

Gone. 

Never to exist until they needed him again. 

“You’re younger than me now,” the Captain said when he woke up, stretching clumsily in the passenger seat. “From all the time that they kept you sleeping, I’m nearly a year older now even though you never slept the entire time like I did.” 

Sleeping, the soldier thought to himself, not knowing what he could say.

“It wasn’t sleep,” he said finally and pulled over to what looked like a small, abandoned park. “Your leg…” the soldier gestured with his right hand at the blood and the Captain nodded his head. 

“Can you still sew?”

How was he supposed to know that?

“You used to help Falsworth with all the medical stuff because you were good at stitching a straight line. Or better than the rest of us at least.”

What was he supposed to do with that information?

The soldier got out of the car, grabbing the bag that had the medical kit in it and helped the Captain out of the other side. The Captain’s leg was seizing up, and he leaned his weight against the soldier, hobbling beside him.

“Oh,” the soldier stopped dead, looking at the marble benches and neatly cut grass.

“It’s a graveyard,” the Captain said, and for a reason that the soldier couldn’t understand, the Captain began to laugh.

The confusion had the soldier frowning, and he turned on his heel, heading toward the far end of the graveyard. There was something about the laughter that wasn’t truly laughter and the soldier wanted to get away from it. He’d heard that laughter before from the cells beside him, sometimes from his own mouth. He’d been a prisoner then, not a soldier and even as he struggled against it, he could feel himself slipping back into that mindset. 

The prisoner lost his own name before he lost Steve’s. He would drift in and out of consciousness, becoming aware of the cold stone beneath his cheek, the ropes that were biting into his right wrist. He would cast his mind out for something, anything to hold onto that would carry him through just one more night, one more day, and then one more night again. Steve’s name was a talisman. 

The prisoner repeated it in his mind as his handlers left him choking on his own spit and then dried him out to the point where he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember the simple things like how many pennies were in a dollar or what twelve times twenty was. His mouth was the Sahara desert, lips cracked and bleeding, but the prisoner repeated the name inside of his head, wondering if the name he held onto so tightly could be his own. 

He knew that it wasn’t. He knew that those blue eyes that turned stormy when mad had never belonged to him. The prisoner remembered tending to bruised knuckles that weren’t his own, chasing a stupid kid down busy streets and cursing under his breath. The prisoner remembered wondering how it could be so hard to keep up with a punk who couldn’t even run properly. 

Steven Grant Rogers.

The prisoner knows that it’s not him because if it was his name, he would have relinquished it a long time ago. Before the starvation, before the isolation, before the first fingers had been broken. The prisoner could sense enough about his former self to know that he’d always been shit at being brave for his own sake, that he would have let himself die a long time ago if it was only himself on the line. But there was someone else, an old friend, and the prisoner held on because there was no choice. If he died then he would never get back to Steve to take care of him again. It wasn’t a matter of making a decision to weather the elements and the battering of his body. 

There had never been a choice, if the prisoner was going to be completely honest with himself. 

The prisoner was sitting in the corner of the cell they kept in him, barely able to lift his head when his handlers came into the room. Light-tread and Heavy-tread. The prisoner didn’t remember what their names were. They’d only told him once and there had been lifetimes in between their first meeting and this unnumbered one. Heavy-tread liked steel-toed boots, clomped around the room so that everyone knew he was not to be fucked with. He curled dirty fingers into the prisoner’s hair, yanking his head back and backhanding him hard enough that the prisoner spat blood. 

“Are you still thinking about him?” Heavy asked and let out a low laugh as he smacked the prisoner again, leaving his head spinning. “Still daydreaming about Captain America coming to rescue you?”

The prisoner didn’t know who Captain America was and he shook his head, resisting the urge to let his tongue touch his busted lip. Another good smack while he did that and he’d be spitting out half of his tongue along with his blood. 

“Steve.” Heavy said, giving him another jerk before he let the prisoner go with a disgusted sound.

Steve?

The prisoner’s head tilted back, lolling against the filth-encrusted wall and the prisoner looked past Heavy toward Light. The smile on his handler’s face scared the shit out of the prisoner, cold and sharp enough to cut clean through the veins. Light stepped forward, and if there had been further back to go, the prisoner would have tried to get away. He knelt down beside the prisoner, not reaching out to touch him.

Light never had to touch him to make the prisoner bleed, and both of them knew it. The man was smiling, and his voice was soft, triumphant. 

“Steve Rogers has been dead since you were taken.”

No.

“He drove the plane he was flying down into the sea and drowned.”

No, please…

“The Americans are saying it’s heroic, but really… he could have jumped off the plane, couldn’t he? He was a better soldier than that.” Light leaned forward and the prisoner tried to blink away the burning in his eyes, his gaze fixed on that bloodless smile. “So the rumour is he killed himself.” The prisoner squeezed his eyes shut, and Light let him, knowing the images behind his eyelids were worse than the ones in front of him. “Killed himself because he thought you were dead.”

“He…” The prisoner spoke, and the words barely sounded human as he tried to force his mouth to work the way it had before. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“Not without a push, no.” 

Light talked about Steve like he knew him, and who was the prisoner to say otherwise, but everything was collapsing in on itself. The ground was falling away beneath his feet and the prisoner shook his head. 

…Stop.

The prisoner stopped. Something turned off with an audible click inside of his head, and the numbness flooded through him as if there were ice running through his veins. Light stepped away. Heavy dragged the prisoner to his feet and lugged him toward the machine. The prisoner didn’t fight this time. He let go of the numbers in his mind that had once meant something to him. He let go of the name and his faded memories of crowded streets.

Steve had disappeared under the ice, and the prisoner didn’t have the strength to hold on. 

Not if it was just for himself. 

Something was shoved into his mouth to stop him from breaking his teeth, and Light was still smiling as the machine powered on. The sound was deafening. It was all he could hear, all he could feel with that rumble underneath of him, and the prisoner started to scream when the first jolt of electricity coursed through him.

When they’d first brought him here, he’d tried to not make a sound, he’d fought against it.

He didn’t have the strength for that either anymore. 

Light was still smiling as the electricity crackled around them, still watching the prisoner with eyes that gleamed in the dim room.

And the prisoner screamed for everything he had lost and everything he would let go.

* * * * *

"Stay still."

Steve was still amused, thinking about the Commandos and the last time that they’d all attended a funeral together. Dum Dum had been the one chosen to give the eulogy and it had been so vulgar that Steve had moved to stand beside the clergyman who was beginning to look a bit faint. 

“Alright, alright,” Steve said as he sat down on one of the benches. There had been a time, he knew there had been a time, when he'd been uncomfortable in graveyards. By the time that his mother had passed, he'd learned how to stand in them, but the hush that had once surrounded the graveyards had long since disappeared. Spend enough time in a graveyard and it becomes easier to see that the ghosts that Steve had once thought lived there didn't live in the graves. They lived in the people who came to see the graves. 

Steve did his best to not move when Bucky cleaned out his thigh wound with antiseptic that he’d picked up from the med kit in the car, but how could he not let out just the smallest of laughs, something that Bucky would have probably labeled a giggle back during the war, when they were sitting as they were? On a bench, with his pants off, and in a graveyard while Bucky was on his knees in front of him and swatting at his knee like Steve was a misbehaving child?

The only thing that dampened Steve's mood was the way that the air around them felt charged. Whatever Bucky was thinking or feeling, the emotions were potent enough that Steve felt like he could feel them radiating off of Bucky's skin. Even the pain of having the other man dig into his skin to try and get the bullet out only had Steve gritting his teeth. 

"You've healed around it too much," Bucky said, drawing his knife and Steve nearly held out his hand to stop him. "My knife or a doctor at a hospital's knife." Bucky raised an eyebrow when he caught the expression on Steve's face. 

"Your knife," Steve let out a slow breath, his hand coming to Bucky's arm and squeezing hard when Bucky began to cut into his skin. "Fuck, that hurts." 

It was very different to get a wound when fighting than to sit and let someone cut into them. If it had been anyone else, Steve might have kept his comments to himself, but around Bucky, even with Bucky the way he was, there was no reason for Steve to hide how he felt. 

"You're bleeding," Steve said after a moment, breathing heavily as Bucky dug into his leg with the tweezers from the med kit. There was blood crusted around the collar of Bucky's jacket, the high collar and Bucky's hair having hid it from Steve until Steve was able to get a closer look. "Why didn't you say something?"

"Sit still."

Bucky's fingers were as gentle as they'd always been, and Steve hissed as the small bullet that had lodged itself in his leg was pulled out. Bucky let it fall to the ground after checking to make sure that it hadn't shattered on impact. Then, he threaded his needle and started sewing the Captain up. The deepest cut was actually from where Bucky had used his knife, and he didn't speak as he pushed the needle through Steve's skin, not flinching or shying away.

Being an Agent of Hydra wouldn't have taken away from Bucky's sewing skill, a thought that still made Steve want to burn the world to the ground. They'd taken someone and made them into their own agent, their weapon. They'd tortured him...

Steve reached out, tugging Bucky's collar away from his neck so he could see the wound, and he stopped dead when Bucky reached up with his right hand, curling it around Steve's wrist so he could pull it away from the wound. He held on for a moment or two, shaking his head before he looked up at Steve again. "It's just a scratch," he said, releasing his hold on Steve's wrist and finishing up his sewing job.

"It's bleeding a lot."

"Neck wounds do that." Bucky countered and Steve couldn't argue with him. He knew that; they'd all seen how people could bleed from a cut on their neck. 

"Are we going to keep doing this? Running away from Hydra? Trying to hide?"

"You can leave." 

Steve had to bite back a sigh and he shook his head. "I'm not leaving, but that's not what I'm asking either. What happens after this ends, Buck?"

Bucky looked up at him, that blank expression on his face that so often came up when Steve asked a question that Bucky either couldn't answer or didn't want to answer. Two years. It had been nearly two years since SHIELD had been destroyed and Bucky had pulled him from the water. 

Bucky shrugged. "It won't end," he said, and when Steve opened his mouth to argue, Bucky fixed him with a look that had his words trailing away. "Cut off one head and two shall take its place," was all that Bucky said before pushing himself to his feet.

* * * * *

There was a letter addressed to him on the table. He’d opened it and then put it right back down again. Maybe if he didn’t pay any mind to it, the contents of it would change. It was a childish thought, but one that Bucky clung to for these brief moments. Steve was out working his new job, tending to a shop. It wasn’t the best work, but it kept him out of the factories right now, and Bucky could only be grateful to the sweet little lady who’d given his friend a chance. Most people would see the thin shoulders and the curve of Steve’s back before telling him that it just wasn’t going to work. She, at least, decided to give him a shot. 

Bucky picked up his shirt from where it lay beside the letter. The shirt was so old that there were little holes that were beginning to show in the fabric. At first he’d thought that it was moths, but the more he looked at the shirt the more that he realized that the fabric was just tired. It couldn’t hold itself up any longer and when the fabric stretched, holes would start to appear. Bucky could understand that. He’d seen it happen with people. The world took its toll on everyone whether they were made of flesh or fabric and people covered the holes with patches, hoping to make themselves last for just a little bit longer. 

War. 

It was such a simple word and not one that Bucky had given much thought to. Oh, there had been war before, and he’d heard the stories. His own father had come back gaunt and unhappy, screaming in the middle in the night about barbed wire and mustard gas. He’d left when the Great Depression had hit, telling Bucky’s mother that he was going to find work, and had just never come back. Maybe he was dead.

A part of Bucky hoped that was what had happened. Better for him to be dead than to have decided not to come back. Better for him to be dead than to have abandoned his two children to the world and left his long-suffering wife to fend for all three of them. 

Everyone was going overseas to fight the Krauts. The bravest of all of them had enlisted already, fighting in a war that didn’t belong to America yet. They were simply helping the allies, the vast majority of people ignoring those neighbors who supported Hitler and his desire to create a master race. Bucky hadn’t even thought that people like that existed in New York until they’d had that rally down at Madison Square Garden. Surely there were some Nazi sympathizers in his neighborhood, there were cranks everywhere, but if they lived here, they sure kept it quiet.

Bucky was seeing more of those servicemen flags in the windows these days, red border and blue stars. It felt like magic sometimes when one of those stars would turn gold and everyone knew then that house was in mourning. Gold meant that someone had died. 

Bucky thought about the serviceman flag that his mother would get once he enlisted properly, he thought of that red border that framed the white rectangle in the center and the single star that would show the world that her only son was in Europe fighting the good fight. He thought about it as he stitched up his shirt. There was plenty of work these days with people headed overseas. War was good for the workers, but Bucky still worked at the same factory that he’d had for years now, helping his mother whenever he could. 

He still visited her every other day, a habit that he’d made since he and Steve had moved out together and into housing with four other men. All of them except for Steve worked at the same factory and if they’d had their reservations about the smaller man, no one had dared voice them when Bucky was around to hear them. 

Already, two of the original four had been replaced. The first two had been eager to get over and fight the Nazis, and Bucky had laughed at them for it, joking that he wanted to wait until the war got to the good part before he enlisted. He’d be right behind them, he promised, but he hadn’t been fast enough.

One of them, good ol’ Joe, had already returned home from the war as a gold star. 

It was hard to still be here. Bucky wasn’t an idiot, he wasn’t rushing to go and get himself killed over there, but he still felt like he should be there. Turn on a radio and it was all you could hear about. There was a duty to the country and Bucky wanted to do what was right, he needed to do what was right. All of ‘em had registered for the draft last year, Steve included, but none of ‘em had been chosen yet. Or at least, they hadn’t been until now. 

Bucky eyed the letter on the table before picking it up and storing it away. 

He’d taken over Steve’s room when Steve had moved back to his mother’s apartment after her death. Steve’d always had the warmest room in the place, Bucky had made sure of that, but with him gone there was no reason why Bucky should have had cold toes. The December wind cut sharp and even now, Bucky’s fingers were colder than he would have liked for precision work. Some of his stitches were sloppy and he considered pulling them out to start again before shrugging his shoulders and tugging the shirt on instead. 

A knock came at the door, and Bucky didn’t have to call out to know it was Steve. Ever since they’d heard the news about Pearl Harbor and America joining the war, he’d been showing Steve how to box. Goldie’s was a dive, but they didn’t need much more than gloves and punching bags for Steve to learn what he needed to. “Gimme a minute,” he called out, laughing under his breath when Steve answered.

“It’s cold! Hurry up!”

Bucky was all bundled up by the time he had the door open and he grinned at Steve, wrapping a brand new scarf around his friend’s neck. “What’s this?” Steve blinked, his eyes wide and Bucky just grinned wider when he saw Steve look him over, checking to make sure that Bucky wasn’t giving up his own scarf. 

“Merry Christmas, pal.” Bucky said and gently nudged Steve out more into the hall so he could close the door behind them. “Figured we wouldn’t get a chance to use it when we were overseas.” 

No gym today, both of them had decided, not on Christmas Eve and not when they didn’t know how long it would be before they got to have another one. It was 1941, and already the war had been raging for years. Some of the guys Bucky had talked to had said they thought the war would be over in a couple months now that America had joined the fray, but there was no telling. 

So instead of church and dinner, Steve and Bucky were going to do their duty and go to the recruitment center instead. Bucky laughed at the way that Steve was touching the scarf as they headed downstairs, automatically adjusting his pace so that he didn’t outstrip Steve. “What? Don’t like it?” 

“Nah, it’s great.” Steve nodded his head. “Thanks, Buck. But… I didn’t get anything like this…”

“Shut it,” Bucky said, giving Steve a mock punch to the shoulder. “One of us is raking in all that swell factory money and the other one’s working at a store. You don’t have to get me anything.”

“Then thanks, Mr. Big Shot.” Steve smiled and Bucky grinned as they both stepped out into the cold. 

God almighty, the wind was cold enough to have Bucky gritting his teeth. 

“You’re welcome, punk. Don’t forget to pack it when we’re on our way to kick Hitler in the pants.”Bucky hitched his coat tighter around himself, holding it close with one hand. Damned patches didn’t do anything to keep the cold out.

* * * * *

Soon after he woke up from being trapped in the ice, Steve found himself thinking of that scarf. For the first week or so after he came to, Steve felt like he would never be able to get warm. It was a feeling that he hadn’t had since he’d been scrawnier, those bone breakingly cold winters where the cold would seep into his skin and not leave until spring came again. He hadn’t brought the scarf with him when he’d gone overseas. By the time Steve had made it to Europe, he hadn’t needed the scarf any more and he was more afraid of losing it than getting cold.

Stupid as it was to want something that was just a mess of wool, Steve wished he still had the scarf Bucky had given him. 

Thinking of those early days in the war was something to do between the tests while they tried to see if he was fit for service. It was easier to think of that than to remember later on in the war, to think about the way that Bucky had screamed as he fell. 

The tests dragged on, each of them reporting what should have been obvious. He was still in perfect condition to serve. Steve could’ve told them that in a heartbeat, but they weren’t looking to see if he was physically able to do anything. The way that he’d broken out of their little simulation had been enough for them to figure out that he was still physically operating much the way he had before. 

It was the mind that they were interested in. They wanted to know just how someone like him was dealing with the fact that he was here. He was here when he should have been back in the 1940s. 

Hell, Steve didn’t even know how he felt about it most of the time, and he doubted any of these head doctors would be able to figure it out either. 

Most of his off time, he spent in the boxing gym. 

Fury didn’t want him straying too far from the SHIELD compound, so there was no exploring the world around him. That was fine by Steve. He was looking into things on his own, slowly teaching himself what he needed to know. Already he’d become proficient at using the phone that they’d given him. A slim little thing that fit nicely into the palm of his hand and that he could give orders to by talking to it. 

That was a phone. It could call all around the world without needing an operator.

Steve was blown away by it, and the cost of it floored him when he looked it up. 

Even if Fury told him it was still considered expensive today, the $800 price tag would’ve bought him a new car back home. It was expensive enough that he tended to leave it in his room when he went to the gym or to the cafeteria. At first it had just been because he was afraid of dropping it or breaking it in some way, but once Fury had grumbled that what Steve was doing was defeating the point of having a phone at all, Steve started leaving it just because he could. 

Back home, he would have…

That was always how Steve thought of it whether he meant to or not. Back home. As if it was just a train ride away or as if there was a way for Steve to turn back the clock and end up in 1945. He’d find out where Peggy was and show up on her doorstep. Flowers, an abashed grin, and an offer to dance. 

An apology for being stupid.

Holding off on having their dance until the war was over had seemed like the right idea at the time, but now it was just another regret, another loss to add to his tally. The pain of losing Bucky hadn’t stopped just because Steve had been asleep for 70 years either. It was as fresh as it had ever been and in Steve’s mind, the future had stretched out before him as bleak as he’d ever seen it. The Red Skull was gone and Steve would fight until the war was won and then what? Head back to Brooklyn?

Live in that empty apartment without any chance of Bucky coming knocking on the door with his stupid quips?

It had been too much for Steve to even consider. He’d made the decision as quickly as he could. He’d not wanted to die, but he’d just wanted it to stop. If everything could just stop, let him catch his breath and mourn what he’d lost, then he’d be okay. Steve was sure of it. 

But the plane was moving fast toward New York, and if Steve didn’t move fast then everyone would be gone. Mrs. Barnes, Rebecca… Every person that Steve had ever known, even if it was just by sight, would be dead and gone, wiped off the face of the Earth. 

So, Steve had aimed the plane at the water. 

No sense in bailing out. The cold would kill him a lot more slowly than the crash would and if this had to be done, Steve wanted it to be quick.

If he’d known, if Steve had known that when he came to that everyone would’ve been dead anyway… would he have made the same choice?

Some of the Commandos were still alive, and if it wasn’t for Fury’s insistence on secrecy, Steve would have gone to visit them in those first weeks he’d been awake. Peggy was still alive too. She had been one of the first people who Steve had been allowed to see. She’d wept, seeing him there, and he’d just held her, his eyes rimmed red. The what ifs were the worst part, Steve was finding. She was so much older right now, having lived most of her life without Steve in it, and he… he…

Everything was as fresh as it’d been when he went under the ice, and Steve didn’t know what to do about it. 

“How are you feeling?” 

Steve’s psychiatrist this time around was a young woman, the same young woman, he realized belatedly, who had first been there when he woke up. “Sorry if I scared you,” Steve said, settling himself down on the couch opposite her, not able to relax even a little. 

“It was a stupid way to wake you up. They just thought… they thought that maybe if you were surrounded by things you knew that it wouldn’t be such a shock for you.”

“And what’d you think?” Steve kept his voice low, raising his head to look at her. “Please tell me.” He continued when she hesitated, giving her a tight smile. “It’ll help ease my mind.”

“I thought it would be cruel.” She said finally, looking down at her notes. “But in this situation, there’s really no good way to break the news to someone about it, is there?” 

“Probably not,” Steve conceded. 

“So to circle back around to where we started… How are you feeling?”

It wasn’t that Steve was trying to be obstinate. That only really kicked in when he was around Fury or the other high-level suits who’d been sent to handle him. The nurses and the psychiatrists were just trying to do their job, and he felt like he might have been more open with them if he’d hadn’t known that they would take their findings straight on up to the heads of SHIELD. 

These were just tests to see if he was fit for duty without even asking if he wanted to go back and fight the good fight again.

Steve didn’t know the answer to that anymore. This didn’t feel like his fight anymore, in a world that had changed so much that nations had reformed and broken. The Soviets had collapsed and China was the rising power. This was a world that threw around the word terrorist like it meant nothing and everything all in one. Steve didn’t know what he thought about this world. 

This wasn’t his world or his fight.

But what else was there for him to do? 

“I’m alright, all things considered.” Steve said, watching as she took notes on her pad in front of him.

“Director Fury tells me that you didn’t want to sleep in the room he provided.” 

“The one that was made up to trick me into thinking that I was still in the past and that all my friends weren’t dead?” Steve raised an eyebrow and the psychiatrist flushed. He was being unfair, and he knew that he was being unfair. 

They’d let him see Peggy again, however briefly. Maybe they’d get that dance after all, 70 years too late and with Peggy frail enough that she couldn’t stay on her feet for more than one dance at a time. 

It was just so hard to not be mad about it. Sometimes Steve felt like that was all he had left in him. Anger and guilt with Steve careening between the two of them. It would have been better if it had all just come to an end. If the world had just let him go and then he and Bucky could’ve swapped terrible jokes up in heaven, waiting for everyone else to catch up. Outliving the people who’d mattered to him the most, well, it had been hard enough with just Bucky. 

Steve didn’t know how to put into words what he was feeling, and he didn’t want to talk about it with this government-funded psychiatrist who he couldn’t trust. People knew who he was, they knew the legend of him. Never a day went by without someone whispering about him when they thought he couldn’t hear or someone stopping to stare in the halls. The legend had come to life, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted it to be that way. 

Bucky would’ve smacked him upside the head and told him to enjoy it.

Peggy, more sympathetic, had told him something similar.

“You have to learn how to live in this world, Steve. It was so gradual for me that I’ve forgotten how different it all must be for you, but… our world, it’s gone now.”

“I know,” Steve had said, his voice soft even as he swallowed the lump in his throat. 

“Did you realize that for me it hasn’t even been a week since I tried to get drunk in that bar?” he asked, instantly regretting it when tears filled Peggy’s eyes. She never let them fall, she was too strong for that, and he’d smiled, hugging her again. “It’s good to see you, Peg.”

“Visit again soon,” her voice had been more of a command than anything else, and he’d promised that he would. 

Steve had taken a moment outside of her closed door, bowing his head and gathering his strength before he faced the world once more. He’d heard her crying through the door, long wracking sobs that went straight into the heart of him. She’d cursed at him when he opened the door, her fists hitting the mattress without any effect.

“No, no, no. I didn’t want you to see this.” She’d said, her voice cracking and Steve, his heart hurting, had taken her into his arms and held her as tightly as her old bones would allow. “I’m so happy to see you. I don’t want you to think that I’m not.”

And Steve had understood it. He’d more than understood it as he’d done his best to soothe her, and she’d done her best to soothe him. Both of them had failed, but taken some comfort in knowing that they’d tried. 

There was a kind of grace in knowing that they’d failed. 

In admitting that they’d lost.

And that it would never come back around for them. There was no second chance here. 

Even bringing up the dance felt like it was token, clinging to the scraps of something that could have been good for them and never was given the chance to do so. 

Steve still wanted it though, despite himself. He wanted it even if it meant nothing so that they could both have some closure on the whole thing. 

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” He lifted his head, looking at the psychiatrist again and nodded along with her question.

“How are you settling in?”

“There’s a lot to get used to. Everything’s moving so fast now, but there’s a lot of good things too.”

“What’s your favorite thing about this day and age?” 

The corner of Steve’s lip curled up ever so slightly, and he leaned forward as if he were imparting a life-changing secret. His smile grew a bit when the psychiatrist leaned forward too so she wouldn’t miss a word.

“It’s the food.”

* * * * *

The graveyard was filling with shadows when Bucky pulled away, heading back toward the car. The longer they stayed in one place, the easier they would be to track and while Steve doubted that they would be looking in the graveyard first, he could understand Bucky’s insistence on keeping moving. "Wait," Steve reached out to stop Bucky as the other began to walk, stopping just short of touching him. "Lemme look at your neck." 

Bucky watched him for a moment, his eyes darting between the ground and Steve before he nodded his head slowly. 

It was Steve's turn to gesture for Bucky to sit on the bench and Bucky sat there without moving as Steve took the time to pull the pants of his uniform back on. They were stiff and blood crusted, but that was a problem for another time. For now, he just reached out in halting movements, his fingers tucking Bucky's hair behind his ear to get it out of the way. 

The gentle touch had Bucky turning his head to look up at Steve with a perplexed expression. It reminded Steve of the expression a child would have, one who didn't understand why things were going well. The sting of the alcohol pad didn't make the soldier flinch, but Steve didn't expect it to. They both had long-since become used to getting patched up after missions. 

"You okay?" Steve asked, not sure what he was asking about. It was obvious that whatever wounds Bucky had, they weren't stopping him from moving around. The look in his friend's eyes was disturbing though, and Steve couldn’t stop himself from speaking, trying to bring Bucky back. "Bucky?"

"Don't call me that."

"What should I call you?"

Bucky was quiet for a long moment, shifting in his seat on the bench as Steve bandaged his neck. Eventually, he shrugged his shoulders, and Steve did his best to smile, to look like everything was alright. 

"How about Barnes? I could probably not get mixed up too much if I call you Barnes."

If Bucky liked it or not, Steve couldn't tell. All Bucky did was nod his head, shying away from Steve's hands once the bandage was in place. "You were right," Steve said, fixing his smile in place. "It was just a scratch."

If he heard him, Bucky made no answer. A hush fell over them that was so deep that Steve felt like if he strained his ears, he would hear the footsteps of the decades of memories that hovered around the two of them like angry ghosts.

Idle hands were the devil’s playground, Bucky thought a billboard that he’d seen down in one of the southern states. It was a curious phrase, one that was strange and familiar all in one. There were too many idle hands these days, and the devil was running around the world like he owned the place. 

He’d seen it before though and after a minute, he glanced at Steve to ask him about it. 

“Oh that?” Steve let out a huff of breath, looking over at Bucky. “It was on the wall of this place we used to live in.”

* * * * *

They told me that if I really wanted to get to the bottom of things, that it was important for me to keep a journal. This will probably be my only try at it. The way that I see it, the museums don’t need any more of my stuff.

It’s been about what, two years now since I’ve woken up and every time I think I’ve got my balance, it gets knocked out from underneath me. 

I don’t know what to do.

There. That’s my honesty for the day.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just making everything up as I go along and hoping that for everyone’s sake I’m making the right choice. And even if I’m not making the right choice, I owe him this much. Bucky did so damn much for me that… I owe him everything I’ve got. 

This whole journal thing, I think it was supposed to make me feel better.

But really all it makes me want is to have my friend back so I could tell him about it instead of paper that doesn’t say anything back.

Don’t take it personally, journal, but I’m probably going to burn you now.

Or at the very least rip out this page.

Sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> Chapter title and lyrics taken from [Soldier on by Temper Trap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZs0_r3ROjg)


	3. Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Winter Soldier and a squad of Avengers walk into a Hydra lab... And Steve doesn't like the punchline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me. 
> 
> (Updated Thursdays)

_There are monsters here, there are,  
And they're wrapped in cotton wool.  
And the faces I once knew,  
they fade, they fade, they fade, they fade,  
And I walk alone._

There were times when Clint took a step back from what he was doing and tried to look at his life as if he were a traveler from a faraway land. What would they think if they were to look at the entirety of Clint’s life and the things that he had done? The last mission that the Avengers had taken on had brought them to the snowy plains of… somewhere. The exact location of it was eluding Clint for now, probably the fault of the concussion that he’d suffered when he’d been knocked out a window from the second floor of a building. The snow had been a godsend even as Clint had cursed it. Some of it had slipped down his collar, and he had been doing the icy spine jig even as he forced himself back up to his feet. 

He’d reached up to make sure that his hearing aid was still firmly in place before dashing off again, doing his best to ignore the waves of dizziness that had assaulted him. Natasha had had this look on her face when he caught up to her, somewhere between exasperation and amusement. Later, she’d told him that he’d been zigzagging as he ran. The exit that Clint had pictured in his mind had him looking like a hero, but in reality he’d probably looked closer to a drunken sprinter.

So what would that faraway traveler think of his life? 

Probably that he was getting too old for this shit. 

Clint had been telling himself that very thing since he’d come off a mission at the age of twenty-five, the brash swagger wiped away by a broken leg that had just taken forever to heal. He’d been cocky, playing the hero that he always wanted to be and he’d fallen right through the damn floor. It was lucky, Clint knew, that he hadn’t fallen just a few feet to the left. A broken leg was a hell of a lot better than being impaled on what had once been a stair railing. 

Hawkeye was well known within the newly budding Avengers organization. There were people who looked up to him and Clint couldn’t help but find it funny. If he was to be honest, he was kind of a train wreck. He barreled into places and made a big mess for someone else to clean up. But even as a train wreck, he accomplished a lot of good things. He had helped to save cities, had gathered intel that had stopped wars, and had made sure that bad guys like Hydra didn’t have a leg to stand on after he’d put an arrow through it.

That’s what Clint kept telling himself. He had to keep going because he did good things. 

That was definitely part of it, but he was starting to realize that there were other reasons for him to stick around and do field work. He wasn’t the type of guy to just sit around and let his friends run into danger, and so long as he didn’t put them into more danger just by being there, he considered that a net positive. 

Even worse was the idea that he just didn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t there on the front lines. 

There were lots of examples of field agents who had become important people within SHIELD. 

Coulson was one. Hell, even Fury had done his time out in the field. That was probably where he lost his eye. It was hard to tell. He’d changed his story every time Clint asked him about it. 

But Clint wasn’t really like either of them. He was the guy with the bow and the arrow.

He was the guy who loved what he did except when he hated it. 

It was great.

No, really.

The lasting effects of the concussion were mild. Clint knew the drill, and so did everyone who tended to him. Hawkeye, God-like as he might seem in his purple uniform, was a regular visitor to the hospital. Even when he hadn’t been hurt, Natasha liked to have him go and get checked out. It was easier now that he could just pop by the Avenger’s facility rather than sit in the emergency room in a New York hospital. Dr. Cho knew his medical history better than Clint did with the amount of times that Clint had been in and out of the Avenger’s medical center.

“Just to make sure,” she’d say and Clint would roll his eyes before he ended up going. He’d tried to skip once. Turns out that it’s really hard to pull a fast one on a spy when it comes to something like hospitals which have records and stuff. 

What would he give to be able to just heal up like Cap could? Clint didn’t want to have to be Captain America, hell no. Way too much pressure. But being able to survive three shots to the torso and being thrown hundreds of feet down into water wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. 

He thought of Cap now as they made their way across the country. Cap had gone dark for weeks, and even though he put the battery back in his phone to check in periodically, it made Clint wish he’d never given Steve that lead on the Winter Soldier. 

There had been enough activity in Pennsylvania that Fury had decided to send the Avengers in. Not Stark since he was busy schmoozing with board members or whatever it was that businessmen did, but Clint and Natasha had been checking out various sites all week. The first one had been a burnt out metal shop that had all the Hydra soldiers trussed up and waiting for the Avengers by the time they got there. That had had the Captain’s fingerprints all over it, and Tony had confirmed that the other man had been the one to call in the tip. 

Since then, there had only been a brief check in or two. There hadn’t been anything so dramatic. 

So it was time to go looking through the old abandoned Hydra bases from the Project Insight data dump. Maybe the soldier was bringing the fight to them, Natasha had thought. Fury hadn’t cared about suppositions, but when Natasha had pointed out that these old Hydra bases could have intel that would help them and also had the possibility of them finding Captain America again? Fury had scowled that trademark scowl, but he’d given his blessing for Natasha and Clint to search.

Clint wasn’t sure about it. Neither of him or Natasha thought that Steve would let Winter do much damage, but all bets were off when it came to the way that the Captain would react to his old friend. 

Even disappearing like this wasn’t like him. 

The bases were most likely abandoned, but the risk was real enough that there were two junior Avengers who’d come in the helicopter with Clint. Scarlet Witch and Falcon had been easy choices for an infiltration. With his military training, Sam fit into these missions well, and Wanda was slowly beginning to gain confidence about being an Avenger. She had even started to wrinkle her nose whenever Clint called her a junior or baby Avenger, which was often.

The last member of their team looked almost out of place. Younger than the rest of them, Josh Morita looked like he should have been in college, and as far as Clint knew, he was just a normal guy. He’d been quick to say that he’d been in the field for years working with SHIELD before he’d defected, and that didn’t bug Clint at all. He knew a couple defectors who’d turned out pretty alright and there were plenty of…. Well, not _average_ , people who were pulling their weight with the Avengers organization. 

“I’m going to scout around,” Clint had said when they landed, overriding the initial protest that they were supposed to stay together. “Listen, the three of you can stay together, but unless one of you knows how to scale a building from the outside, I’m going on my own.”

“You’re just going to use your grappling arrow,” the kid spoke up and Clint turned his head to look at him, not quite hearing what he said. The kid repeated himself and a hint of a smile graced Hawkeye’s lips. “You can let me use another arrow and go up with you.”

“Get your own arrows,” Clint said, his grin crooked as he headed off to the building. 

Even though he was getting older, Clint liked the race to the top. He liked it a bit less when Falcon whizzed past him and settled down on the ledge of the roof. 

“I forgot about the wings,” Clint admitted, making a face. 

“How could you forget about the wings?” Sam said, probably speaking slower than usual so Clint could piece it all together. “They’re my thing.”

It was simple enough to get to the top and getting through the thick door at the top was made easier by the small explosive charges that Clint carried with him. He was never sure what kind of arrow he’d need for this kind of gig and had brought two quivers with him. One with his standard armour piercing arrows and another, smaller one with a grab bag of tricks, each fletched in a slightly different way so that even if Clint were blinded he’d be able to tell what he was pulling out. 

Wouldn’t be able to see what he was aiming at, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. 

“Hill, this is Hawkeye. Falcon and I are heading in.”

* * * * *

The soldier wasn’t sure why he was here. 

He had been. He’d been the one to suggest that they come here, but it slipped away from him at times when they were here. In more clinical settings, he could feel himself slip back into autopilot. The Captain and him had split up, with the Captain arguing about the idea until it was pointed out that they could get out of here sooner. The risk was minimal. There was obviously no one in this base. The lights were all off, and when the Captain found the breaker to turn the power on, the majority of the lights were broken or flickered like they were clinging to their last scraps of life. 

That was fine by the soldier. With the lights the way they were, he felt more like he was walking into a war zone than into a Hydra facility. A nightmarish world was easier for him to deal with than clean, pristine hallways. 

The Captain had gone down to the basements where the laboratories were more likely to be. He’d insisted on it and the soldier hadn’t cared enough to fight him. There were moments when he’d looked around and realized that he didn’t quite feel the same. Barnes, the Captain called him, and it was familiar without making the soldier feel like he was ready to crawl out of his skin. Barnes was friendly. Bucky… Bucky felt intimate for a reason that the soldier couldn’t quite explain. Maybe it was the fact that it was a nickname. Maybe it was because none of the interviews or exhibits that the soldier had seen had called Barnes by that affectionate name. 

Either way, things were easier than they’d once been and the soldier had begun to relax around Captain Rogers. It was slow, small steps every day, but even those small steps had the soldier looking around, thinking about things more. The world had been a flat grey landscape, and even if there still was no colour to the way that he saw the world, at the very least there had been a bump or two on the horizon. 

Barnes took it for granted that he was alone here. When Hydra had pulled out, they’d done so in a hurry, and the thought made him want to smile even though it never reached his lips. 

Fuckin’ cowards, he thought to himself and blinked a couple times, surprised at the thought. 

It was unusual for him to think that way if he were honest. It felt raw, like he was cutting into his own skin and peeling away scar tissue that he’d long since stopped noticing. 

He didn’t like being here. Abandoned or not, nightmarish or not, there was still enough of Hydra left here that the soldier felt like he’d see someone he knew when he turned around. There was the sound of rats in the hallways, small scuffling sounds as they moved, and the soldier, waited in the corner, hidden by the dim light. His gun was already aimed at one of the rats, his finger on the trigger.

He’d seen these rats before, he thought. A Hydra rat and a random mouse. 

They were a quarter of the way down the hallway before they saw him, in between doors that they could have ducked into. The rat had a smile on her face, that tight determined smile that Barnes had seen so many times. They’d worn that smile when they’d conditioned him. They’d worn it when they sent him out. Part grimace, part bravado, Barnes knew that smile too well. He’d probably worn it himself at some point. 

Hydra-trained agents were given the best training possible, but they weren’t Barnes. They hadn’t had everything stripped away and had decades of missions compressed into the space of a waking year. “Drop your weapons,” he ordered, his voice flat. Barnes wasn’t sure what he’d do if the agents had actually complied. It was something he’d done for the Captain, but the Captain wasn’t here and it was almost a relief when he had to dodge out of the way of an energy blast.

Barnes’ finger tightened on the trigger even as he ducked, the bullet that had been aimed at his head hitting the wall behind him. The rat hadn’t been so lucky, and she fell against the wall, holding onto a wound on her shoulder. The mouse looked at Barnes, then to the girl, and before Barnes could say anything else, the mouse had fired off his own round of shots. 

Not so ambitious or maybe just smarter than his rat partner, the mouse had aimed for the torso instead and even though Barnes tried to dodge, one of the bullets took him in the shoulder, pushing him back as the other one hit him in his side. Then they were running, calling out to their superiors as they ran away from him, and Barnes bit back a groan, pushing himself back off of the wall as he took off in pursuit. 

They were in the stairwells. 

Barnes took to following up, sticking to the walls. It was a wider path, it would cost him a few precious seconds, but it wouldn’t allow anyone to shoot at him either. A weapon was no good if it was broken.

He could hear swearing ahead of him, his mind siphoning out the conversation from the sound of feet on the stairs. 

“Fuck. Fuck. Move your ass.” 

There were more calls to whoever was on the other side of those communicators, but they were out on the roof by this point and the soldier was a mere flight behind them. 

Barnes heard the shots before he reached the top of the roof, slowing instinctively. He doubted that they were waiting for him at the top of the stairs, but if Barnes got shot in the head, he was no use to anybody. 

The mouse was the one who’d stood in front of the door, trying to block Barnes’ way with his body. It wasn’t anything personal, but he had to get to the Hydra Witch. Barnes had been given a taste of what she could do once, they’d thought it would be fun to let her get into his head. 

He kicked the mouse across the roof, barely pausing in his stride as he raised his gun to aim at the Hydra agent. She wove red energy around her fingers, protecting herself from each bullet. It was while he was dodging that he felt something tugging on his boot. The mouse had grabbed hold of him, barely able to keep conscious. Gun at the ready, he inched forward and used his boot to turn over the man who was gasping for air. The witch had stopped firing, maybe because Barnes was too close to her friend. Whatever it was, Barnes couldn’t bring himself to care as he held he nudged the fallen mouse with his boot, turning the man over onto his back. Barnes’ stomach sank, his eyes narrowing as he aimed his gun again.

He knew this face, but the man who had worn it was dead.

The museum had said so.

* * * * *

Run, run, run.

There wasn’t much in the way of thoughts running through Josh Morita’s mind if he was going to be honest with himself. As a young agent, the grandson of the Howling Commandos, going into SHIELD had been a relief, a way to escape from a domineering father who wanted his son to be the next Captain America. It was his grandpa that had helped Josh get into SHIELD in the first place, making calls and pulling at the right strings. 

They’d waived the age requirements for Josh at his grandfather’s request and he’d joined before high school was done, young and stupid.

He wasn’t that young anymore even though people still called him the kid.

He’d been with SHIELD for ten years now, and for more than half of that, he’d been their field agent. His family hadn’t batted an eye when he’d left the agency to work for the Avengers instead. Josh’s father had even clapped him on the shoulder, sure this was going to take his son one step closer to the serum, but it wasn’t like that. 

Still stupid, but not as young. Josh liked to joke and wished that his grandpa was still around to hear it.

What would he think about his Josh running away from the brainwashed assassin who’d once been Morita’s sergeant? There was a cutting way to the way that Grandpa Morita spoke that had never left him right up until the day he died. Everyone had talked about it. Especially Mr. Dugan when he’d come over to joke and reminisce about the old days and how simultaneously great and fucked up they’d been.

What would they say if they knew that he’d joined the other sideas soon as his SHIELD training had been finished? There were terrorist organizations that were actively recruiting and having an agent on the inside was essential to getting good intel. It didn’t matter that he’d been working as a double agent. Josh had grown up doing unspeakable things and for awhile he’d thought that it had been worth it. Those unspeakable things had led him to Hydra, to the fact that it was growing inside of SHIELD and he’d joined them, thinking somehow that he still had time to pass the information back to SHIELD. To warn them of the parasite inside of the organization.

And in the end? All of the things Josh had done had been for nothing. SHIELD had fallen, brought down by Captain America himself. Hydra had burrowed deeper underground and most of the information that Josh had abandoned Hydra to bring to SHIELD had already been released online.

Josh had been trained from a young age to be the best that he could be, his father unforgiving and his mother unhelpful. She’d help Josh wash the cuts on his hands, place cold cloths against the bruises that she’d find on his back, and then she’d pour herself another drink. She’d lock herself in the only bathroom that their house had, weeping quietly as if no one was going to be able to hear her.

It was his mother that he thought of first when the bullet ripped through Wanda’s shoulder, sending him reeling and even now, he couldn’t stop thinking about what the pain must have been like. Josh had been shot before, all of them had been, and Wanda tugged at him. Their communicators weren’t working as they should have been, her magic disrupting the fields around them. 

“You have no powers.” Wanda said, her smile wan. “You have no defense like I… My brother and I….”

Josh tried to think of the man who she was talking about. There had been briefings about Quicksilver and what he had done to save civilians, but the image of the man slid away from him the more he tried to hold onto it. “I…” He began to say and she shushed him, pressing a finger to his lips. “I’ll guard the door,” he found himself saying anyway.

“You have no powers,” Wanda repeated.

“Neither does Hawkeye or Black Widow.” Josh countered, glancing over his shoulder at her.

“He’s only killed Hydra agents so far, do not put yourself in his way.”

Josh watched as Wanda moved away from him, moving to the edge of the building.. She was going for the line that Hawkeye had set up earlier, slipping into the harness so she could rappel her way down. She gestured for Josh to come with him and he’d taken only a step when he heard the Winter Soldier in the stairwell. Josh barely felt like he had time to turn when the Winter Soldier’s boot slammed into him, sending him skidding across the roof.

Whether it was him or Wanda that the Winter Soldier fired at, Josh would never know.

Wanda held up her arms, doing her best to block the shots, but her powers were divided as she threw a shield around Josh as well. She abandoned the zipline, still wearing the harness as she threw beams of energy at the soldier. 

The pain washed over Josh and he closed his eyes, waiting for his turn as the Winter Soldier made his way over to him. For someone who should have been so heavy, he barely made a sound on the gravel covered roof as he made his way closer. Josh grunted as he was flipped onto his back, his eyes cracking open.

Sergeant Barnes was looking down at him, his gun pointed at Josh’s face. From this distance, Josh had no doubt that the slightest wrong move would end up with him getting it right between the eyes.

His breathing was ragged, his world swallowed up by the waves of pain that were washing over him. Josh thought about his grandfather, about what Morita of the Howling Commandos would have said about this, when Barnes nudged Josh with his foot.

He had pulled the comm from Josh’s ear and was holding it in front of his mouth. The glow of red faded from around Josh and the communicator seemed to crackle back into life. .

“Come in, Maria.” Josh began, his voice weak. “I’ve… made contact with the Winter Soldier. He’s with me now.” He cut off, his eyes rolling up into the back of his head only to have the Winter Soldier bring him back with a sharp slap to the cheek. Josh could hear the faint sound of talking from the small speakers on the earpiece, but without it in his ear, he couldn’t make anything out.

“I don’t know where Hawkeye is.”

Josh groaned, his eyes beginning to cross. The Winter Soldier looked down at him for a moment longer, a determined look in his eyes before he set the communicator down beside Josh’s head.

“Sergeant Barnes?” Josh managed to get out, but the Winter Soldier didn’t look his way. Instead he pushed himself to his feet and Josh, feeling the world grow colder around him, shivered on the roof as his vision blurred and the Winter Soldier moved away from him.

* * * * *

There were times when the letters from home were the only amusement that any of the soldiers had. So long out in the field, often without a way for them to be contacted outside of military personnel, there would be small stacks of letters waiting for them each time they returned back to camp for a longer stay. Everyone would savour them, opening them slowly one by one. It was 1942 and the luster of the war had long since worn off for the American soldiers. 

They’d been eager at fight at first, a strange mix of fear and pride that kept them awake at night, thinking about the amazing things that they would do in battle given the chance. Bucky smiled at that, thinking about it now. It was a wry memory of his, proved so wrong in hindsight. The war was long and bloody, with heavy casualties on both sides, and Bucky had been promoted up the ranks for his ability to keep calm and shoot even when the ranks were falling apart. 

It wasn’t so hard in his head. He’d always had a good eye for this sort of thing, acing his marksmanship training. When he got nervous, he just aimed for bigger parts of the body. Headshots were clean and quick, but if his nerves were jangled, it was easier to aim for the torso. That was all there was to it, Bucky would explain when he was asked about his ability by the other soldiers. It wasn’t anything special.

It seemed like the biggest threat to the soldiers was disease more than anything else. Bucky had seen more people sick to their stomachs in the past few months than he had in his entire life and was thankful for his cast-iron stomach. Steve would have been miserable out here just for the food alone, he thought. 

And damned if that wasn’t the best part of the whole damn war.

No matter how desperate things seemed or how frantic the battlefields became, no army recruiter worth his salt would take Steve Rogers into the army. 

It was hard on Steve, Bucky knew. The frustration tinged with bitterness could be felt in every letter that Steve sent if one were to read between the lines, but that was fine by him. They were young and stupid, driven by national pride. It didn’t matter that Bucky had been called in for his draft, the important thing was that he’d volunteered. That was what he’d told himself as he shipped off to training, when he left Steve, Rebecca, and his mother standing on the train platform and waving him off. 

The excitement had been palpable then, as if they were going to see a film rather than heading out to the most dangerous place imaginable. 

Rebecca had looked worried, biting the lipstick off her lower lip again and again until Bucky teased her for it. “Well maybe I won’t care if you get blown up then!” She’d said, her eyes filling with tears even as their mother dragged her daughter off to give her an earful.

She’d come back later for a hug, her eyes red around the edges. She’d had a friend, an Englishman who’d been studying in New York. He’d been called back for the war and she’d found out later that he’d been killed. That was it. No details whatsoever aside from the date that he’d died and a small letter from his family saying that they were sorry they hadn’t said anything sooner. 

“I might’ve married him one day,” Rebecca said, looking down at the letter after she’d finished crying into Bucky’s shoulder. “He always said he wanted to.”

“You liked him that much?”

“I don’t know,” Rebecca carefully folded the letter along the same creases before slipping it back into its envelope. “I liked him enough to think about it at least, but I thought there’d be more time. He’d go over, the war would be won, and he’d come back to ask me again.”

Bucky had hugged her close, his fingers smoothing down her hair as she cried and he’d tried not to think about the draft that had been put into place. Maybe it would never get called in, he thought.

Two years later, here he was.

In hell on Earth with a bunch of dirt-stained envelopes that he kept in a small waterproof bag.

“What’s your sister up to, Barnes?” One of the men called out with a laugh when Bucky flipped him the bird, but sidled up to him anyway. “C’mon, she’s probably a looker.” 

“How d’you figure that?” Bucky drawled, tucking away the letter that he’d been reading into his little bag. 

“One of you had to get all the looks.”

A mock punch to the shoulder had been enough to steer the conversation in a different direction. There had been little news from Rebecca. She’d been offered a job while working in an office in Manhattan, but no one, not even their mother had any idea what the job was actually about. Rebecca hadn’t known when she’d stepped on the train, she’d only known that there would be an unbeatable salary compared to the secretary work that she’d been doing. Bucky had thought that once she’d reached wherever it was that Rebecca would have been able to tell him more, but her letters never mentioned her work. 

Even without her mentioning much about what she was doing, there were big black bars across parts of her letters, making some sentences unintelligible. Bucky could pick out bits and pieces. Something about mud and ruined shoes. Another thing about her and her friends having the pick of the nice boys that came around. She wrote about how she’d ruined one of her stockings and had taken to drawing a seam on the back of her leg so as to not feel so naked.

That one had made Bucky chuckle and the other soldiers had grinned when he related the story. 

They were a mixed group of American and British soldiers, drawn together by a single cause. Despite the teasing, there was some real bonding going on here. Bucky had seen men embrace each other like brothers, regardless of where they’d come from. Wherever they’d been born, they were in Europe now. And most of them probably weren’t gonna leave here. 

There was one soldier who didn’t share much though, a Jap who read his letters all in one go and then brought them out one by one to read them again. He never joined in the conversations about home or about family. 

“His family’s in a camp,” went the rumor. “They would’ve locked him up too if he hadn’t volunteered as early as he did.”

Bucky didn’t think much about it. He was thinking about the drawing that Steve had sent him of the girl Bucky’d been seeing before he joined the army. She was sweet on him, that much was obvious, but she was impatient. Each letter, she bemoaned the wait that God was forcing them to endure, each letter becoming shorter as time went on. She hadn’t even sent a letter in the last batch although she’d had Steve draw a portrait of her to send along with his own letter. 

True to life, Steve had faithfully depicted her. She was a stunner. There was no denying that, but Bucky didn’t feel anything as he looked down at her demurely downcast gaze and her pouting lips. He’d have given the picture to another soldier to make use of if it weren’t for the fact that Steve had been the one to draw it. 

There was a scuffle further down the line and Bucky raised his head to see if anyone else was going to deal with it. When no one seemed to be around, he jogged toward the two fighters and got in between them, pushing them apart. “Save it for the Germans, will ya?” He glared at the blond man who stood in front of him. Blue eyes, the same thin frame, he could have passed for Steve from behind if he was about half a foot shorter.

“The Jap started it,” the man began to protest and Bucky turned, ready to chastise any soldier who’d been involved in the fighting, but the other soldier - Bucky hadn’t found out his name yet - was gone. “Fuckin’ coward.” The other soldier spat, and Bucky gave him a shove. 

“Go get yourself cleaned up, ya dumb gorilla.” Bucky shoved him again and if the man thought about taking a swing, one look at Bucky’s eyes convinced him otherwise. 

“It wasn’t Morita who started it,” a voice came from Bucky’s left once the gorilla had meandered off and he turned his head to see another soldier. He was one of the newer ones, the ones that you could tell weren’t quite broken in. It was obvious by the nervousness in his voice when he addressed Bucky, bowing his head a couple times. “Well it was, but I can understand it.”

“Why’s that?”

“His dad bought the farm.” The man said, lowering his voice to an exaggerated whisper that Bucky supposed only he was supposed to hear. “He was in one of those Japanese camps and walked too close to the fence so they shot him.”

“Just tell everyone about it, will ya?” Bucky said and then let out a laugh when the blood drained from the soldier’s face. “Ease up, kid. You’re alright.”

Bucky found himself thinking about the other soldier, Morita, long after he should have stopped caring. Stuff like that was commonplace over here, but it wasn’t supposed to happen back home. Not in the world that he’d grown up in. 

But then, Bucky thought with a huff of breath that could have been a laugh, the world he grew up in had died when the war started.

* * * * *

Steve should have known that something was wrong the instant that he saw Hawkeye in the base. It just didn't click at first. Seeing the other man after weeks of just being with Bucky had some of the tension draining out of Steve. 

Being with someone who looked like his best friend, but couldn't ever remember being one was hard enough in its own right. 

There was a constant nagging thread in the back of Steve's mind, reminding him that this man wasn’t his Bucky. His friend was still in there, but he’d never be the same friend. Steve had thought that he’d come to terms with that, but it was never quite as easy in practice as it was in theory. There were always moments when Steve wanted to let the mask slip, just an inch, just for a moment. 

In a perfect world, he would have been able to set the shield down for a moment, and Bucky would have smiled, sat beside him. They could have gone back, somehow, to what they had been before. 

They were making progress. Slow, faltering progress, but the soldier didn’t look at him like he used to. Maybe Steve was deluding himself, but it didn’t feel as cut and dried as it had in the beginning. The mood between the two of them was more comfortable now, closer to how it had been back when they’d each known who the other was. There were still moments when it felt like nothing had changed, and those were the most dangerous ones. Those times when Steve would start walking and Bucky would fall into step beside him as naturally as breathing or when they were fighting and they still worked so well together, knowing where they both needed to be without having to ask the other about it. 

Steve would slip backward then, losing his tenuous grip on the present and falling back through all the years. 

Blink and it was like nothing had ever happened to separate them.

Blink again and Bucky’s expression would become stoic and stubborn, a blank slate for his commander to write on. There were times when Steve would look at Bucky and see nothing reflected back, no sign of life within those familiar eyes. It was hard not to despair. Steve wasn’t immune to it even though he kept his feelings on the matter quiet. It didn’t matter to Bucky that they had a past, not now. If that was stopping him from killing Steve, that was the best that Steve could hope for. The nights were when the quiet was the hardest to take in, when the tasks became few and far between and they simply had to be near each other, spend time with each other. Strangers who had somehow found themselves on the same path. 

All of that tension seeped away when Steve realized that it was Hawkeye who was on top of him, Hawkeye who he’d been about to punch in the face. He grinned up at Clint, laughing under his breath when the other man got off of him and offered him a hand to help him up. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” he said, slinging his shield over his shoulder and surreptitiously checking to see that Clint had his hearing aids in before continuing to talk to him. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“Could say the same about you,” Clint let out a laugh, brushing himself off and checking to make sure the data he’d downloaded onto one of Stark’s fancy drives was still safely in a pouch at his side. “You went off the radar, Cap.”

“Yeah, I…” Steve paused, everything coming back in a rush. “I had some things I needed to do.”

“Well,” Clint eyed Steve for a moment and then he nodded his head, obviously not buying the nonchalance with which Steve was speaking, but leaving it for now anyway. “I’m glad you’re not dead. Lemme round up the newbies, they’d probably faint if they got to talk to Captain America.”

“Newbies?” There was a sinking feeling in Steve’s stomach, his grin sliding off of his face as all of that tension ricocheted back into him. “What newbies?”

“I have some baby Avengers with me. We’re trying to pull data from the Hydra bases we could find to augment all the holes in SHIELD’s files…” Clint looked at his friend for a long moment, eyes narrowing. “You went dark because you found him.”

“Yeah,” Steve nodded his head.

“He’s here with you now…. Isn’t he?” Clint had stopped smiling too, all business.

“Yeah.”

Neither of them had spoken to each other after that. Steve had turned on his heel and started back up the stairs that he’d come down. A flight or so beneath him, he could hear Clint trying to get a hold of the Avengers. “Hill, this is Hawkeye. Come in.” He must not have heard any reply because maybe ten seconds later, Steve heard him cursing about what a piece of shit this communicator was, and his pace quickened. 

There was no reason for Bucky to attack Avengers personnel. That was what Steve kept telling himself. There was no reason for him to try to hurt anyone who wasn’t going to try and hurt him, but… the silence felt unreal now. Steve had made it up 8 flights of stairs before he looked down a hallway and saw Bucky in it. The other man seemed to look right through him for a moment, disoriented. 

“Bucky, you’re bleeding.” Steve could see the blood from here. The black of the uniform hid where the wound actually was, but there was no hiding the blood gleaming dully against the metal of his arm. “Where are the others?”

“Did you know that they would be here?” Bucky’s voice was flat as he took a step forward, his gun pointed directly at Steve.

“I had no idea,” Steve held up both hands, showing that he was unarmed as he moved closer to where Bucky stood. “C’mon, Buck. Put the gun away, and we’ll get out of here.” 

Two shots in quick succession were fired at Steve’s feet and he paused, looking down at the marks in the floor before his jaw clenched and he stepped over them. “We’ll leave and get everything figured out.”

Bucky wasn’t looking at Steve any more, he was looking past him and Steve turned his head just enough to catch a glimpse of Clint standing in the doorway, arrow drawn. “Where’s my team?” Clint’s voice was loud enough to carry down the hallway, and Steve held up a hand to try to tell Hawkeye to cool it. 

“Injured.” Bucky muttered, but it was only loud enough for Steve to hear and certainly not loud enough for Clint to pick up even with his hearing aids. 

“Bucky…” Steve began and then stopped, correcting himself. “Barnes… we’ll figure this out, but I need you to put the gun down.”

“You’ll take me to the lab.” 

It was the first time that Bucky had ever said something like this and it stopped Steve short, confusion knitting his brows. He’d read up on the way that Bucky had been treated during the war and after it. When the conditioning had ended, Bucky had mostly only seen laboratories when he wasn’t out on assignment, his brain and his arm constantly being tweaked or, as the report had said, “improved upon”. Bucky had that blank look on his face and Steve, for the life of him, couldn’t read what it was the other man was thinking. 

“It’s not gonna be like it was before, Buck, I promise.”

Steve barely had the time to get the words out before Bucky moved, putting away the gun, but there was a knife in his other hand as he darted forward. He caught the hand with the knife, his fingers tightening around the wrist until Bucky couldn’t push forward. He was so focused on the knife, thinking it would be like the fight before where Bucky put his full weight behind trying to push the knife into Steve that Steve didn’t see the punch aimed at his stomach until it knocked him right back into the wall. The white wall cracked behind him from the force of the hit, Steve’s arm falling protectively around his stomach and Bucky looked down at his metal fist as if he was surprised that it had even moved. 

“Don’t!” Steve yelled, but this time it was to Hawkeye who had drawn his arrow back and let it fly. It hit Bucky on the inside of his metal arm and he jerked, staring down at the crackle of electricity as his arm went dead at his side. The shutter closed over Bucky’s expression, the assassin taking over as he pulled the arrow out of his arm and dropped it to the ground. He still held the knife in his good hand, looking between Steve and Clint as if trying to figure out who would make the most sense to use it on. 

There was this inexorable feeling of being pulled in, the world narrowing to this one moment, and Steve knew that he wasn’t going to be able to fix this. Hawkeye already had another arrow notched, this one aimed directly at Bucky’s heart. 

“I finally got through to Maria,” he called down the hall toward the super soldiers, not moving from his place in the doorway, his eyes were reading the small block of text that Maria was broadcasting to the communicator on his wrist. “Wanda isn’t responding. Morita is in so much pain that she can’t get anything solid out of him. So if you’ve got a plan to stop this guy from doing any more damage, Cap, I’d love to hear it.” 

Hawkeye paused, letting out a humourless chuckle. “Or, I would have if that EMP arrow hadn’t blown out my hearing aids too.”

To Steve it was almost as if the arrow was moving in slow motion, but even then, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get his shield out in time. His body moved without waiting to consult his mind and Hawkeye’s arrow took him in the chest instead of Bucky. He’d been shot before, Steve knew the pain of metal piercing skin in a rush, but the searing pain didn’t stop at his chest. He swayed, his jaw slack, looking down at the arrow in his chest before he went down to his knees. 

“You dumbass!” Clint was shouting, pulling out another arrow, but he didn’t have time to shoot before Bucky started after him, his long strides closing the distance between them quick. Steve could only watch as Clint pulled back, dashing up the stairwell with Bucky right behind him. He could hear them after they disappeared, time slowing in Steve’s head as his body seized up. He couldn’t move his arms any longer, couldn’t even find the air to shout out to them, to say that he was alright. That he just needed a minute. 

Steve slumped back against the wall, his breathing slowing, and the only sound that he could hear was Clint yelling something as Bucky caught up with him.

* * * * *

Hawkeye had done his share of fighting things that were way too big for him to even consider fighting. Ultron had been bad enough, but there had also been aliens, and then there was the time he almost shot an arrow at a Norse God… But it had never felt quite so personal as it did now, with the Winter Soldier charging after him like he was intent on ripping Clint apart limb by limb. Clint couldn’t hear the sound of it, but he didn’t need to glance behind him to know that the assassin was right behind him. The roof was his only chance, he thought, notching a bola arrow and letting it fly. 

It was harder now, now that he couldn’t hear, and Clint supposed that should have gone without saying. Take away one of anyone’s senses and they’d have trouble living their life in the same way, but Clint had never stopped to think about it before he’d had the accident, just how much he relied on his hearing when it came to his shots. Visual confirmation was necessary now, and it grated at Clint, that extra second of wasted movement as he lined up his shots. Since the accident, things had been different and Clint supposed that he should have been used to it by now, but it was never something that one just got over and moved past.

How could he when it had changed the way he lived his life? The bolas wrapped around the assassin’s legs to send Winter crashing back down a flight of stairs and Clint nodded to himself, not bothering to wait and see how long it would take Barnes to get out of them. They were tightly wrapped and titanium wires, so the knife would be useless, but who knew how long it would take with that metal arm and super soldier strength behind him? 

Clint made it to the roof, the door already having been ripped off its hinges. He’s already been up here, Clint thought to himself, forgetting that he was the one who had blown the door as he hesitated. “Shit, it’s the kid.” Clint muttered under his breath. He moved to where the agent was, crouching down beside him and getting ready to make his last stand here if he had to. Wanda was kneeling beside him, trying to keep him still and Falcon, probably out scouting the entire perimeter was no where to be seen. Clint couldn't even see the glint of the sun off of Sam's wings. 

“He got … way. We were … to leave…” Wanda was shaking and Clint reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, trying to steady her. He couldn’t hear a damn thing and it was hard to keep focused on Wanda’s lips when there was an angry super soldier coming after him. “I was Hydra… we … danger.” 

Clint had been readying to move the kid, knowing that it wasn’t smart to do, but not able to see any other option when the kid, only half-conscious shook his head. “No, we’ve got to go.” Clint said, frowning as he tried to read the other man’s lips, knowing that they didn’t have the time for this. 

The kid, clinging to what little consciousness he had tried to speak again, and this time it was Clint who shook his head, tapping on his ear. “I got no juice, kid. I can’t hear a damn thing.” Plus, Morita was injured and probably speaking in fragments which was making it that much harder to try and read his lips. 

Clint felt the vibration against his wrist and looked down at his comm. There was a new message from Maria, all in caps to highlight its importance.

EVACUATE SCARLET WITCH.

Clint swore under his breath, easing Morita back down and picking up his bow again to face the door. “Easy there,” he said when Winter came through it, eyeing Hawkeye warily when he saw the arrow aimed at his heart. “We might be on the same team.” Winter dodged to the right and Hawkeye let his arrow fly. It hit Winter in the side, pulsing with a soft light even as the main shaft dropped off. Winter’s fingers wrapped around Hawkeye’s throat, lifting him up and off of the ground and Clint lashed out with his feet, kicking at the wound that his arrow had just caused. It was enough to have Winter dropping him back to the ground after the second kick and Hawkeye scrambled away, holding his hands up much in the same way that Cap had before. 

Wanda had burst into life, her energy swirling around her fingers as she knocked Winter back, pinning him against what remained of the door. The look on her face told Clint that she wouldn’t be able to hold him for long. 

“Listen to me because I’m deaf right now and can’t hear anything you might wanna say.” Clint managed to get out, his throat burning from the pressure of Winter’s fingers even after the assassin had let him go. “The Captain’s alive.”

Winter stopped his struggles and then burst free of the red energy, shooting Hawkeye a murderous glance and stepped forward.

“No, no. I mean it. He’s paralyzed, but alive. It’ll wear off in… I don’t know. However long it takes you and him to get rid of toxins in your system. He’s alive, but you don’t have much time.” Winter was listening to him now, and Clint took that as a good sign. “The other Avengers will be coming for you.”

There was the vibration of another message coming in, then another, but Clint didn’t dare look away from Winter. “Leave the Captain with us. Let us get medical help. He’ll find you again. You know how he is.” Clint swallowed hard, biting back a curse at just how much that hurt. “We’ll make sure he’s okay, and they’ll let him go.”

Again, the vibration against his wrist. The messages were coming in so quickly now that they were almost constant. 

“But they won’t let you go.”

Winter didn’t move, didn’t even flicker an eyelid.

“So go. You’ve still got time.” Clint heaved a sigh and kept his hands up, glancing at his wrist just long enough to see the words ‘WHAT’ and ‘DOING’ before his attention focused on Winter once more. “It’s what the Captain would have wanted, Barnes.”

There was a moment where Clint wasn’t sure if this was going to go his way, but Winter turned and broke into a sprint toward the stairs. It was only when Winter was gone that Clint realized the enormity of what he’d done. That was a dangerous man that he’d just let free, but… he had bought him and the kid more time which was all that really mattered right now. Clint had to trust that the Captain was right about Barnes. And if he wasn’t…?

Clint pulled out his phone, opening his map app to look at the small pulsing dot on it. The tracer arrow that Clint had shot Barnes with seemed to still be working. He nodded to himself and went back to the agent, doing his best to stabilize him before the team Maria was sending arrived. 

If the Captain hadn’t been right, at least they’d know where Barnes was so they could take him out.

* * * * *

**Avengers Center Hospital  
Emergency Department Discharge Disposition**

**Patient Name:** Rogers, Steven Grant  
 **Rank:** Captain  
 **Age:** 97  
 **Sex:** M  
 **Attending physician:** Sarah Wilson, MD  
 **Diagnosis:** Large dose of Pipecuronium to the heart via arrow. 

**Notes:** Due to the advanced healing that patient shows, arrow wound has nearly healed. Wound was reopened to ensure no foreign objects were under skin. Patient showed signs of regaining muscular control after seventy minutes. Possible that if heart had not been hit, full paralysis would not have occurred due to patient’s advanced physiology. 

Patient was instructed to stay overnight for further monitoring.

Captain Rogers signed himself out of the emergency ward and refused further treatment two hours after hospital admission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> Chapter title and lyrics taken from [Monsters by Angus Powell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAB-_k9c-4s)


	4. The Emotion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Just think of something different, Stevie.” Bucky said, making himself grin when Steve raised an eyebrow at him. “Think about what you’re gonna do when you get back home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me. 
> 
> (Updated Thursdays)

_Rolling through the dark  
Calling to the light of day  
Both eyes are open now and I'm running  
I won't turn around for you_

_The emotion is suddenly out of me  
The emotion is building up inside of me  
And what you're looking for is suddenly out of reach_

The map that Bucky held in his hands was old and worn, beginning to tear at the creases. He’d had it with him since Steve had come to save him, picking it out for himself and designating himself the keeper of the map quietly while letting Steve have the compass. Steve never complained about it, both of them poring over the map shoulder by shoulder as he plotted their route. 

The fire light was making shadows dance around them and the rest of the Commandos were tucked away in their tents, sleeping. Steve and Bucky had the first watch. They always took the first watch, preferring to let the Commandos sleep first since they needed it more. Steve had tried to argue that Bucky should sleep with them too, but Bucky wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to stay on watch with Steve and even if Steve didn’t know it, Bucky hadn’t needed so much sleep since Zola had experimented on him.

Argue with Steve enough and he would relent, but only when he wanted the same thing. If Steve had not wanted to spend time with Bucky on watch, he would have forced Bucky to set up camp and sleep with the rest of the Commandos. He would have dug in his heels and not budged for the world. But Bucky knew that Steve had wanted to spend time with him as much as he wanted to spend time with Steve and after a few back and forth quips, Steve had agreed to let Bucky take the watch that he wanted.

At first, Steve had been uncomfortable with command. It wasn’t that he was afraid to lead or that he didn’t have the strength to do it. If anyone was bull headed enough to become a leader just by willing it to be so, it would be Steve, but he knew that he didn’t have the training that the others did and whatever combat capabilities that he had were undermined by his lack of tactical training. 

If the serum had been able to make more soldiers, if he hadn’t been touring around like a dancing monkey for months when he could have been out on the front lines and doing some good, maybe Steve would have received proper training from the army. Maybe he would have earned his Captain status. Instead, it was an empty title, awarded to him to keep up appearances, and Bucky had been working hard to make sure that Steve was the best Captain that anyone could have asked for. 

There were long rides together, the first car in the convoy where they would go over various strategies with Bucky quizzing Steve at the end of it. 

“This is just like being back in school,” Steve had joked at first, during one of those first meetings when Peggy and the Colonel had been there with him, trying to cram as much military strategy as they could into Steve’s head with the limited time that they had. They’d had less than a week back at the camp before they’d been sent out again. Steve and the Commandos were too useful as resources to keep around sitting on their duffs and looking pretty. 

The first missions that they’d been sent out on had been minor skirmishes. The Allies had lost many soldiers to the Hydra camps, and liberating them was treated like a training ground. 

“Yes,” Peggy had said in a light, airy tone. Bucky wasn’t sure, but he’d thought that maybe he could see a hint of a smile beneath her stern press of lips. “But this time if you don’t remember the answers when test time comes around, you and your men will die.”

Steve had been quieter after, his brow creasing in that way that was so familiar to Bucky. He’d learned quicker here than he ever had to in school. Having a taste of the stakes, Steve wasn’t willing to let anyone down if he could help it. Maybe the serum had given him super-brain power too because even Bucky, knowing most of the information that they were trying to cram into Steve’s skull, would leave those half-day sessions wrung out and exhausted. 

There was a Hydra base in France, well guarded and positioned dangerously close to the allied forces. It had been named Captain America and the Commandos’ first target and even now, even more than a year after that first mission and on their way to wipe another Hydra base off the map, Bucky could remember how much Steve had worried about that first base in France. That had been the first real target that they’d hit, and Bucky had caught Steve unfolding the map to look at it before folding it back up again and putting it back in Bucky’s bag. Five minutes later, Steve had it out again, and Bucky had gone to sit beside his friend, kicking lightly at Steve’s ankle before he took the map out of Steve’s hands. “Stop thinking about it.”

“Do you?”

“Sure, I do.”

It wasn’t the first lie that Bucky had told Steve, and it certainly wouldn’t be his last one. He’d smiled, clapped his friend on the shoulder, and put the map back into his bag before moving the bag out of Steve’s reach. 

“Just think of something different, Stevie.” Bucky said, making himself grin when Steve raised an eyebrow at him. “Think about what you’re gonna do when you get back home.”

“What _we’re_ gonna do, you mean.” Steve corrected him, a smile playing on his lips and Bucky laughed.

“What? You think I’m not gonna be sick of looking at your dumb mug by then?”

It had become their talisman, their reminder of how things could be better. Steve and the Commandos never went home with their leave time. There was always a chance that they'd be called back and be needed quickly. That suited Bucky just fine. 

They had more missions than Bucky could count under their belt now, but that nervousness never quite disappeared entirely. Bucky folded up the map, stowing it away and looked over at Steve when he moved away from the fire to sit beside him. The nights were cold now, and Bucky knew that the snow was deep enough to go up to his knees in some area. He wrapped his arms around himself, giving himself a little squeeze as if that would make him warmer as he tilted his head back to look up at Steve. 

"What're you thinking of all the way over here?" Steve asked and Bucky just shook his head, pushing his hair back out of his eyes. He slicked it back normally, but the wind was wreaking havoc on his hair and he grinned at Steve. 

Bucky had been thinking of needles, of the drugs that he still had nestled away at the bottom of his pack in case of emergencies. The first pangs had hit a day or two after Steve had pulled Bucky out of that lab, and he'd thought they were normal. All he had to do was ride them out, he'd been through a lot, Bucky thought. They'd done something to him and he felt different, a stranger in his own body, but those first few days he thought that if he could just hold out a little bit longer that it would get easier. 

That was the way that things were supposed to go. 

"I'm thinking about what's gonna happen after we blow these last couple bases off the map."

"Think they'll give us some time off?"

"Not a fuckin' chance," Bucky laughed and shook his head. 

"When we get back home, let's go see a baseball game." 

"Why not?" Bucky said, looking up at the darkening night sky and trying to picture what that would be like. Could they really just go home and be like they were? Even happier because they wouldn't have to worry about Steve hacking up a lung or dying of some previously unknown disease that he just miraculously happened to catch? "You can use your pull as the Captain to get us into anything we want."

Steve laughed, watching as the embers of the fire had died down. He always took first watch since he didn't need as much sleep as the rest of them and Bucky, doing his best to hide that he didn't need the sleep either, would join him. "We'll go from place to place. See something in every state."

"You could draw pictures of all the neat things we see."

"Might draw one or two of you too." Steve's smile softened and he turned his head to look at Bucky. 

"Of me? Naw. Stick to pretty flowers and shit." Bucky laughed, not surprised in the least when Steve just shot him this look.

"Stop sulking." He leaned in, his fingers curling around the back of Steve's neck as he pulled him in for a kiss. They'd been sneaking around for nearly a year like this, ever since there’d been a mission where the war had become real for Steve. They had been taking down a Hydra base, one of their first ones, and Bucky had helped clear out a nearby tower so he could use it to snipe the Hydra soldiers. He’d almost died then, had nearly been thrown off the tower, and Steve had kissed him for the first time on its battlements, high on fear and spiked with adrenaline.

They had fallen so easily into their strange relationship, and for the life of him, Bucky couldn't remember exactly when all the feelings had started. He’d loved Steve in his own way since they were kids on the streets of Brooklyn, had sought out men who looked like Steve to fuck in back alleys. Maybe Steve was the same.

Maybe those feelings had always been there. 

"You goin' soft on me, Buck?" Steve chuckled, probably surprised at the gentleness of the kiss. Generally they were scrabbling for time and Bucky wasn't going to waste a second of it with the niceties, but somehow here felt different. 

Soft glow of firelight, snow falling quietly from the sky, and the possibility of getting painfully murdered if you let your guard down. 

What a romantic thing, Bucky thought wryly.

"Me? I'm a sweetheart." He gave Steve a shove when the other man laughed. 

"More like a sweet talker."

"Worked on you, didn't it?" It was easier to laugh now than it had been in months. Bucky had been so sure that he was never going to get home, that he would die here and be pushed into some kind of mass grave to be forgotten about. But Steve, whether he knew it or not, had been too damn stubborn to accept even that from Bucky. 

"I was an easy shill." 

It hadn't been easy at all. Bucky looked at Steve, wanting to tell him just how long things had been like this for him. Long enough for him to have given up hope, long enough for him to have thought it impossible.

"Well, don't tell anyone I've gone soft." Bucky said, pulling away and going back to facing out into the dark. The enemy was out there somewhere and the last thing that Bucky wanted was to be caught unawares."It'll cramp my style."

There was a shifting among the tents and then Dugan poked his head out of it, bleary eyed.

"I'll cramp your style for you if you don't shut it, Sarge." 

Bucky turned to look at Dugan before his gaze slid back to Steve.

"Guess we'd better listen to the bitter old man, huh."

And Steve, an amused smile playing on his lips had nodded his head, pressing a single finger to his lips.

The epitome of patience, Steve waited until they could hear Dugan’s soft snoring over the sounds of the fire before he stole another kiss.

* * * * *

There were platitudes among platitudes, none from Tony or the other Avengers, but Steve hadn’t expected that from them. They were strangers, brought together with a common purpose. Strangers who hadn’t even been that keen to get along with each other at first. Once the news got out that Captain America was once again among them, people had been coming out of the woodwork to see the legend, and Steve had been stopped in the street more than once by someone who had wanted to talk about the Howling Commandos. 

He’d learned how to deal with fans when he had been touring the country as a show girl trying to drum up money for war bonds, and even though the fame came from a different place, the principle of it still remained. 

It was easier to be rude, but Steve kept himself unfailingly polite. Most of the questions were benign or even bizarre. Did macaroni and cheese exist when he’d been a kid?

Well, yes, but it had been closer to a lasagna or a casserole than the mac and cheese he saw around these days. 

Did he really punch Hitler in the jaw?

No.

There were the harder questions interspersed between them. Fury had handed him a sack of letters once. Fan mail that had been sent to the government when they didn’t know where to send it. Some of the envelopes didn’t even have an address. They just had “Captain America” with postage attached. Some were printouts of emails that had been sent, all of the letters and the emails pre-read by SHIELD as a security precaution. 

Overwhelmingly, people would ask if he was okay and that they were sorry for his loss. It was the loss that Steve didn’t want to think of, but kept finding himself getting drawn back to. He’d toured the states on his motorcycle, keeping to the route that Bucky and him had decided on. It had been a meandering route, starting in New York and working their way west to California before heading back east again. Both of them had decided, for the most part, to avoid the deep South, but Steve found himself driving through those states anyway. 

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting from his trip. Absolution? Forgiveness? Peace?

Steve had found none of them. The anger that had been his constant companion since he’d woken up had given way to something deeper and more raw. Sadness, Steve thought, before shying away from the term. Captain America didn’t have the time to be sad, and Steve Rogers? Well, Steve Rogers had lost himself somewhere back during the war. 

He’d never found his way back out of it. 

Maybe he would have if he hadn’t nosed his plane down into the Atlantic, Steve would never know, but it felt like everyone else had moved on with their lives and he was stuck. A man out of his own time who couldn’t find his place in this one. 

Steve thought of Bucky a lot during those times, the wounds still so fresh. It had been little more than a month since Bucky had died by Steve’s reckoning, and the grief still felt so strong that he was drowned by it. There was nothing to do during those times but get angry. Lash out at Stark or some drunk in a bar, trying to instigate a fight that Steve knew he’d win and hoped he would lose. 

“I know guys with none of that worth ten of you.”

Steve had said. Thinking about Howard and the son that he had left behind, who was so similar and at the same time so different that Steve kept forgetting that Howard was dead. Until Tony said something, shattering the illusion, never knowing that Howard had just died over again in Steve’s mind. 

Morita was gone too. Morita who’d only been able to avoid the internment camps because he was in the army. Morita whose family had lost everything because of a country that he was risking his life for. He’d been a good man. 

They’d all been good men.

Bucky… Steve would push the thought away of his friend’s death. The way that Bucky had fallen, the scream that he’d let out as Steve had watched him tumble out of sight, and the death that he still couldn’t bring himself to mourn. There were times when he would think that Bucky was right there beside him, a grin on his face. He would walk into one of the hotel rooms and forget somehow until the door closed behind him that Bucky wasn’t going to come walking out of the bathroom. 

He wasn’t ready yet, and he wasn’t sure that he ever would be. 

“It will take time,” Peggy had said to him, reaching out with a frail hand to take Steve’s hand into her own. How delicate she’d become, Steve thought to himself as he sat across from her in the care facility that she had been placed in. “You just need to give it time, Steve.”

And what if I don’t want to?

Steve hadn’t said the words, but he could tell by the way that Peggy’s expression softened that she could hear them anyway. Peggy managed a sad smile at him, her fingers tightening around his with a strength he hadn’t thought she still had. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it will come.”

How do you know?

A look at Peggy’s face and Steve didn’t have to ask. Of course, she knew. Peggy had lost Bucky too, and then she’d lost Steve on top of that. 

“I suppose you will keep fighting then?” Peggy’s voice brought Steve out of his reverie, and he’d looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve always made a lousy civilian. It’s a wonder you ever made it through before you became a soldier.”

“Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?” Steve smiled, slight, but it was there and he was surprised when Peggy didn’t smile back, her lips thinning into a single line.

“I learned how to put down my shield,” she said, her voice so quiet that even in the stillness of the room it was hard to hear. “There’s more to the world than fighting the good fight, Steve.”

Like what?

The war had ended, but for Steve he couldn’t feel that it ever had. There was no homecoming for him. No celebrations or medals. There hadn’t even been anyone to send the gold rimmed service flag to when Steve had died although he’d read that Peggy had made sure it was sent to Bucky’s family. The road felt emptier than it had before even though Steve saw cars on it. 

The journey that had made him smile so much when he’d thought about it decades ago seemed hollow. It had always been meant to be traveled with a friend, but Steve had no more friends left. No one who was his own age who could understand intrinsically where he’d come from.

So when SHIELD had made the offer for him to work for them, to lead a team and to do some real good in the world, Steve had taken it. He’d found that he craved the routine that working with SHIELD could offer him, and knowing that Peggy had been the one to found the operation only sealed the deal for him. If Peggy and Howard had been behind the organization, Steve was sure that it was continuing their work from the war. The world had seemed so complicated and messy during the war, but it had been more simple in many ways. Steve pushed these thoughts from his mind when he went on his missions, pointing out inconsistencies with the stories that Fury was telling him without bothering to argue them.

A soldier didn’t need to know more, he told himself without believing a word of it.

The truth was harder to admit. Steve just wanted something simple, he wanted something in this heavily interconnected future that he could hold onto. SHIELD gave him that, and the missions he’d taken with Natasha and his team reminded him of his days fighting side by side with the Commandos. 

There came a time when he didn’t think of Bucky or his past every day, when they weren’t ghosts haunting the back of his mind. The months passed and Steve could almost trick himself into thinking that he was carving out a place for himself in the twenty-first century. His work was challenging and dangerous, demanding most of Steve’s focus, and it was only when he returned to his too-quiet apartment, empty of the bustle that he could hear in the hallways, that Steve couldn’t run any more. He would shrug his shoulders and turn on a record, something familiar that called him back to better times. He would pull a book from his shelf and read about the other wars that America had embroiled itself in. 

And long after the sun had set as he tossed and turned on a bed that was still too soft, Steve dreamed of the people that he’d lost, each of them screaming as they fell beyond his reach.

* * * * *

At first, when he’d first woken up, Steve had been confused. He couldn’t remember when he’d lost consciousness and his body felt unlike his own. After the battle on the helicarrier there had still been the same slowness to his movements, the same exaggerated care of someone who was trying to learn how their body worked again. What had happened came back quickly though, and Steve had been impossible for the nurses to keep in bed. It wasn’t the same as the helicarrier where Bucky had disappeared. There was an urgency now that hadn’t been present then. SHIELD would be hunting the Winter Soldier just like Hydra now, and Steve knew he had to be the first to find him.

He hadn’t expected the panic that made his throat tight, but Steve swallowed it down as best he could, pushing himself out of bed and just trying to keep himself busy. 

Sam had been nowhere to be seen when Steve woke up, a strange contrast to the last time that he had been in the hospital. There were doctors bustling around him and Clint was in the corner of the room, checking something on his phone. Steve had wanted to grin at him, but his mouth still felt stiff and even though his eyes were open, it was hard for him to push himself back up into a sitting position. The doctor even tried to stop him before he saw the way that Steve had set his jaw and realized that there was no arguing with him right now.

“What happened?” Steve’s voice cut through all the chatter and the noise as he waved to get Clint’s attention, the only sound the beep of the heart monitor. His fingers signed quickly, echoing what he’d spoken aloud.

“Uh…” Clint looked at the busy room, for a moment before shaking his head. Later. He signed and Steve signed right back at him, not even moving his lips that Clint should tell him right now.

Bucky was gone.

Steve got that much out of Clint before he got out of bed, ignoring the protests of doctors and superheroes alike. He was still unsteady on his feet, but that would go away eventually. Every moment he spent lying here was another moment where Bucky would be lost. 

“Where is he?” Steve signed, no words leaving his lips as he looked directly at Clint. He could still remember everything that had happened at the base and Clint had taken the damaged hearing aids out of his ears until he could find new ones. Clint shrugged and Steve, knowing that he wasn’t going to get an answer out of him when there were doctors here, ordered everyone out. The doctors were surprised, the nurse who was helping him remove the cords that were monitoring him actually starting when Steve spoke, but his tone brooked no argument, even when Steve softened his command into a request. These were civilian doctors, not ones that belonged to SHIELD, and they wouldn’t ask questions from Steve. It was likely that only after he was out of earshot that they would start talking about how strange Captain America was being. 

When the room emptied out, Steve could see that it was much bigger than he’d originally thought, a waste to have just him in here when they could have easily fit another patient or two. He eyed Clint for another moment before he turned around to start getting dressed. He was still clumsy, but he could feel his strength coming back to him as he got himself ready. His uniform still had a hole it from where the arrow had pierced, and when Steve tried to pull it on, he realized that there was nothing to put on. They’d cut him out of his uniform to dress him in the flimsy hospital gown and unless he was willing to run out of here butt-naked, Steve was forced to stay put. Clint held up a single finger, telling Steve to wait and disappeared from the room. 

Steve picked up the small phone in the room, dialing Sam’s number from memory so he could get the other man to pick him up. Figuring out where he was took some digging, but again, there were those handy little bibles that had the hospital name stamped in the front cover. Steve read it out to Sam and then hung up, knowing that the other would be there to get him soon enough. With nothing else to do other than turn on the TV, Steve looked down at his hands and tried to remember everything that had happened. Bucky had come back. Steve had thought that he’d hurt Clint, but Clint was moving too well for Bucky to have hit him, so something else must have happened on that roof. 

Steve had been stuck in the hallway, cursing his body. Being small and sickly had been one thing, but he’d never been paralyzed before and he couldn’t even blink his eyes. It was beginning to hurt as they dried out when Bucky came back, crouching into Steve’s field of vision and searching his face. Steve wasn’t even sure if he was breathing. He supposed that he had to be for him to still be alive, but he couldn’t feel the rise and fall of his chest. Bucky put his good hand in front of Steve’s mouth, testing for breath and Steve saw him frown as he pulled his hand away. He reached out and his fingers brushed against Steve’s face as he lowered Steve’s eyelids. The world went dark, Steve’s eyes burning as he listened to the scrape of Bucky moving Steve’s shield and walking away.

That was the last thing that Steve could recall before he was here. Maybe the shallowness of his breathing had finally done him in, but either way, Steve could feel a nervous tightening in his chest as he waited. He turned on the television, flipping through the channels to the news so he could get an idea of where he was. Bucky and he had been in middle America. Had SHIELD moved Steve somewhere safer? It was disorienting and frustrating. Steve had to stop and force himself to take stock.

He had a ruined uniform and the hospital gown that he was wearing. It looked like the boots were still intact, and Steve looked them over for a moment before setting them back down on the floor. But that was it. No weapons. No shield. Steve supposed that Bucky had taken it with him, and that was fine by him, but it wouldn’t help Steve find Bucky any faster. 

Clint knocked on the door, barely waiting a second before he stepped through the door and tossed a plastic bag at Steve. Inside was a change of clothes that had Steve grinning a bit. Really? This was the underwear that he found? He looked over at Clint who shrugged like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. They were red boxer briefs with Tony’s first Iron Man suit plastered over the side with his hand repulsor right where Steve’s dick would end up. 

“For extra protection.” Clint said, his facade cracking when Steve signed that he hated him and full on breaking down once Steve had pulled the boxers on. Despite himself, Steve laughed too and went to work getting himself suited up. The clothes that Clint had bought were unsuited for combat, but all Steve needed to be able to do was get to Bucky. The rest of the clothing he would figure out later. For now, the nondescript pants and the powder blue t-shirt would do to get him out of the hospital without drawing too much attention to himself. 

It was enough to make him feel normal again, Iron Man underwear aside, and Steve turned to Clint with a half smile still on his face before he became serious again. “I’m going,” he signed. Clint swore quietly. 

“Wait.”

Steve looked over his shoulder, a few feet from the door. He raised an eyebrow at Clint’s insistence and raised another eyebrow when Clint shoved his phone into Steve’s hand. “I put a tracker on him. Unless he’s managed to pull it out, you can still find him through it.”

“Who else knows about phone?” Steve signed as best he could with one hand and Clint shook his head. 

“Just you and me, Cap.”

Steve looked at him and then back down at the phone, watching the small blinking dot on the screen. “Don’t make me regret this,” Clint said and Steve reached up to touch him on the shoulder, not sure how to sign the words that would explain how he was feeling. 

“Thanks,” he signed instead and tucking the phone into his pocket, he opened the door to his room. He’d barely taken a step out of it when he heard Clint saying something else. Something about phones and Steve owing him a new one. 

Steve headed downstairs and out one of the side entrances, blinking at the bright sunlight. For once he was glad that the Avengers Complex was so far away from the city as he stretched, and walked over to the car that Sam was leaning against. Without a word, Sam slipped into the driver’s seat and waited for Steve to get into the car with him before he pulled out of the parking lot. 

“You really should have stayed in the hospital.”

Steve didn’t bother to turn his head to look at Sam, knowing the look that other would have on his face. There was a reason that Sam had been so effective when he worked at the VA, quietly stating the mistakes that people had made without making them feel bad for them. It was like having little moments of clarity to combat the sticky mire of decisions that Steve had been making ever since he’d become Captain America.

“I know, but I’ve gotta find him.” Steve said, ignoring the way Sam bit back a sigh. 

“Well, we’re back at Stage One, aren’t we?”

“Not exactly,” Steve didn’t blink an eye when Sam stopped the car again and this time, Widow climbed in with them. “Clint stuck a tracer on him.”

“Hey guys,” Natasha said, leaning forward in her seat so she could look at the phone that Steve was holding in his hand. “You should really do Clint a favor and break that while you’ve got it so SHIELD will get him a new one.”

“Why doesn’t he break it himself?” Sam deadpanned and Natasha fixed him with a cool smile, hiding her amusement.

“Because it sounds better if it’s done by Captain America.”

“Isn’t that how it goes for most things?” Steve chimed in, smiling inwardly when Natasha turned that cool expression on him and for a brief moment it felt like everything was getting back to normal.

* * * * *

The first time that he went to one of these bars, Bucky didn’t know what to expect. Oh, he’d heard the stories. Every boy had heard the stories and knew what the penalty was for those who got caught, and Bucky had always told himself that he wouldn’t have any part in it. It had become easier for him to hide it. Caught young, Bucky had known to guard his thoughts and to keep all those deviant desires to himself. They would come and go, the yearning cresting within him like a wave and he would shut himself away somewhere private, his eyes squeezed shut as his hand wrapped around his dick.

Touching yourself was a sin too, but Bucky already knew that he was hell bound. From the instant that he’d first realized that he was different, Bucky had known that the fires waited for him. God had made all of them as his children and for some reason had decided to make Bucky out of a deficient material or maybe that was the devil whispering in his ear. Everything could have been so perfect. Bucky was athletic, he did well in school, and he was quick to pick up things that others struggled with. Everything could have been fine if it wasn’t for the stupid kid with the hunch to his shoulders who wheezed in the winter like the air itself was poisoning him. 

Fuckin’ Steve, Bucky thought, raising his head from where he sat at the bar to order another drink. There were plenty of men here, some painted and effeminate. Others looked just like Bucky, impossible to tell at first glance, and he had probably passed these men on the streets without ever knowing that there was a deviant among them. 

“What’s wrong, gorgeous?” Bucky looked up to see who was talking to him and nearly blanched when faced with the slender blond man in front of him. 

“Nothing.”

“First time here?” The man wasn’t taking the hint and instead, he sidled closer to grin at Bucky. “I come when I can, but you can always spot someone who’s new. They don’t really know what to make of it.”

“Is that what I look like?” Bucky let out a huff of laughter, a rueful smile on his lips. 

“That’s exactly what you look like.” The blond ordered both of them a drink, and leaned into Bucky slightly, nudging him with his shoulder. “What’s your name?”

“James.” 

It felt safer to use his first name than his middle one even though Bucky couldn’t say why. He found himself turning his head to look over at the blonde as he picked up his drink, the smell of it telling him that it was probably strong enough to strip paint off of a car. “Well, James…” The blond downed his own drink, his fingers trailing lightly up over Bucky’s arm. “Do you wanna dance?”

At first, Bucky had thought to say no, but the alcohol running through him made him feel bold and quietly, looking over at the dance floor that was missing the women that Bucky so loved to charm, he nodded his head. It didn’t strike him until they were already moving that he didn’t know how this would work. Which one of them would be the girl in this situation? Bucky didn’t have to wonder long, the blond grabbing his hands to pull them into the right places so Bucky could lead.

“You’re a good dancer,” the blond said and Bucky had just grinned at him.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Time blurred together after that, the partners switching until Bucky felt like he had danced with half the bar. Somehow, toward the tail end of the night he found the blond in front of him again, pressing against him and drawing him close. Bucky breathed deep and smelled cigarettes, the sharp scent of alcohol off of the blond’s skin and as if they were tired of waiting, his treacherous fingers tangled in the blond’s hair to tug his head back. Closing the distance between them, Bucky pressed his lips against the blond’s. It took a moment to shift gears, to realize that the softness that he’d become so used from kissing women wasn’t present here, and he groaned as the blond deepened the kiss, swiping his tongue over Bucky’s bottom lip. 

“C’mon, I know a place.” The blond said, tugging Bucky out into the back of the bar and then out into the alley. They walked in silence throughout the city, to this little hole in the wall of an apartment. It was small, but the furniture was nice, making Bucky wonder if this guy was a banker or a business man. Then the blond gave him a push and Bucky leaned back against the wall, pulling the blond against him.

“I never got your name.” Bucky gasped as the blond worked on the buckle of his belt, undoing Bucky’s pants enough to pull his cock free.

“Call me whatever you want.” The blond said, flashing a mischievous grin up at Bucky before he sank down to his knees. Bucky didn’t know what the other was doing, only having vague ideas of it, before he felt the press of lips to his shaft and his head fell back with a groan. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut as he did when he was alone, but the guilt that he normally felt was fading away. It didn’t matter, he told himself. Fuck what the priest said. When Bucky opened his eyes, the blond was transformed. His shoulders were more frail and his eyes that Bucky couldn’t see any longer would be blue rather than the brown he’d seen in the bar.

Bucky watched as if it wasn’t his dick that hardened from each slow swipe of the blond’s tongue.

His fingers tangled in the blond’s hair once more, tight enough to have the blond moan and Bucky thrust into his eager mouth. They had always told him that this was wrong. Everyone knew that this was wrong, and that God would punish him for what he was doing. But if it was wrong, Bucky thought as he bit back a moan in the small apartment, if this was his ticket to Hell, then Bucky was going to enjoy every second of it.

* * * * *

There were times when clarity seemed to come to him, cutting through the haze of his mind as if nothing had happened, and even though Barnes couldn’t remember much about his past, there were flashes still. Flashes of what he had been and who he had wanted to be. Barnes, the previous Barnes, the one who had lived back when the second great war was still going on, had wanted to be a good man, and he’d struggled with it. That much, Barnes knew. It was comforting in a way that he hadn’t expected it to be, to know that the confusion wasn’t something new or something that he would have to live without. This skin wasn’t his, but it was close enough that it didn’t seem to matter when his mind was like this. There were stronger feelings that would hit him sometimes, guilt and sickness that would churn his stomach and leave Barnes leaning against a wall in a meager attempt to right himself. 

It always passed, the nausea, but Barnes would think about it long after it had subsided. 

He’d killed innocent people. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t killed anyone who wasn’t affiliated with Hydra since then. Murder was murder, and it was so easy. There had been a war on before, and Barnes could see how it would have been easy to justify killing a person. Bucky had been a weapon long before he’d been truly honed into one. The few things that he’d read about the man had been enough to cement that image into Barnes’ head. 

For now, he was sick of the killing and all he wanted to do was to find a place to hide. SHIELD would be coming after him now too after he’d killed two of their agents, and the hazy heat of late summer was enough to have Barnes sweating slightly as he climbed up into yet another abandoned building. It was a factory of some sort, eerily reminiscent of the one that had burned down while he was with the Captain, but that was comforting too. 

Barnes didn’t try to pick it apart. Sometimes when he did things like that, the comforting feeling would dissipate and there would be nothing left to hold him here. Maybe he would become the soldier again. Barnes had thought that he would fight against becoming that soldier again, but he didn’t really have it in him. The soldier had its uses, his instincts honed in a way that would keep Barnes and possibly the Captain safe. But the soldier had been losing its grip on Barnes’ mind the more time that he spent with the Captain. After years of not being treated like he was a person, humanity was slow to come back, but it was still there, still waiting. 

Right now, the first thing that he had to attend to was his wounds. He was no good to anyone when he was hurt like this and if infection festered, Barnes might get sick. That would just make him easier to capture. There were drugs in the pack that he had taken from the car before he’d ditched it. SHIELD probably knew the license plate and could use that to track him, so he’d left it at the side of the road and continued on foot. It had taken a lot of wandering, too much for the Captain to be able to track him, and maybe after this was over, Barnes would find a way to find the Captain again. 

The archer had said that the Captain was alive and Barnes wasn’t sure if he believed it. The breathing had been so shallow that Barnes hadn’t been able to tell if it was there. The Captain’s eyes had stared at him, unblinking, and Barnes had felt something twist inside of him. The emotion was a knife in his chest that he didn’t know how to pull out.

There was blood staining through his armor as the soldier pulled it off; the SHIELD agents had done their work well. The few shots that they had gotten in were still bleeding, the healing that Barnes’ body attempted to do thwarted by all the movement. It had taken hours to find an abandoned building that suited his needs. The windows were still boarded up for the most part and it didn’t look like Barnes would have to fight for his space here. To even get into the building, he’d had to climb up a fire escape.

Every time he had to climb, with every rung of the ladder that he’d used to get into this building, he could feel the wounds opening again. The worst was the long piece of the archer’s arrow that was still nestled inside of him. Try as he might, Barnes hadn’t been able to pull it out of himself and he knew that he would have to cut himself open more, widen the wound so he could get his fingers inside of there. 

It wasn’t going to be pretty, but that was one of the few perks of being a weapon. Weapons were easier to put back together than people. Barnes was going to use that to his advantage. He pulled on a loose red sweater, dirtier than the armour had been. It had been a long time since they’d stopped to do some washing and for the most part, the Captain had dumped their clothes into the bathtub of motels before crouching down to wash them with some cheap soap. Barnes had watched him work, sitting on the closed toilet lid and just taking in the actions. They were so familiar and strange all in one. There was something wrong or different about doing it this way, but Barnes couldn’t put his finger on it. 

As it was, Barnes barely noticed the smell from the shirt. It didn’t matter what it looked or smelled like. What mattered was that it was loose enough that it could be easily pulled up. He’d barely finished changing into the shirt when a wave of dizziness hit him and Barnes slumped against the wall, closing his eyes as if that would make things better. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, bleeding onto the floor with his right hand pressed against his stomach in a futile attempt to stop the flow of blood, but Barnes blinked himself back into full consciousness when he heard a sound. 

From far down below him, probably on the first floor there was someone or something in the building. If it was an animal, Barnes could chase it off, but his all too recent brushes with Hydra made him cautious as he reached for his gun. He could hear the sound of metal against metal and for a moment the image of Steve trying to knock down the board with his shield came to mind, but that wasn’t possible. Even if the man hadn’t been lying about Steve being alive, he was hurt. He wouldn’t have been here so fast.

The instant that Barnes moved his right hand, the dried blood cracked and pulled the wounds open again, but Barnes barely noticed as he flicked the safety off, his finger resting feather light on the trigger. 

If he had been in top form, there wouldn’t have been a single threat that could have taken him down like this, but he was tired and dizzy, blood loss coupled with a pain strong enough for him to feel was starting to take its toll on him. He barely noticed that there was someone else in the room with him until they moved. She had her hands up, a shock of red hair blurred around her face as Barnes tried to blink his way through the pain. 

“We’re with the Captain,” the woman said, holding her hands up to show that they were empty. “We’re not going to hurt you if you don’t hurt us, so… just put the weapon down.” She took a step toward him and Barnes stood his ground, his eyes narrowing as he looked at her. “Steve is coming. He’s just looking downstairs first…”

He had seen that red hair before. On the bridge with the Captain, she had been there too. She was SHIELD, his mind screamed at him and without thinking, Barnes raised his gun. He wasn’t going to shoot her, he told himself, just scare her a bit, but Natasha, as he would later learn her name to be, was not one to be threatened. She knocked the gun away from his hand, punching him in the stomach right where the blood was beginning to seep through his shirt. Barnes felt the jolt of electricity course through her body, something from her gloves and he groaned low in the back of his throat, lashing out with his left arm. It was enough to throw her across the room, but he’d barely taken two steps forward before she was on her feet again. 

The new pain that he felt was sharper, clearing his vision, and Barnes stepped back to let the soldier take over. He wasn’t at his best and he knew it, but even fighting her at his best, he hadn’t been able to take her down. He glanced at the gun between them, but as if the woman was reading his mind, she got in between him and it. The blows just didn’t stop. She dodged most of them, knocked back by the few ones that were able to make glancing contact. For all the blows that the soldier was able to stop of hers, it just didn’t seem to be enough. She was aiming for the same spot every time and he brought up a hand to cover the arrow wound, leaving himself open to a different set of attacks. 

The soldier kicked her back, hard enough that she didn’t get up again right away. He could have finished this, right now. Every part of him was telling him to just step on the back of her neck and step down until he heard the crunch. It wouldn’t be a killing blow, but it would take the woman out of the game for good. Still, the soldier couldn’t make himself doing it, Barnes protesting loudly in the back of his mind, and instead he headed toward the stairs, toward the roof. There was someone else there, the black soldier who the soldier had fought on the helicarrier. 

His head spinning, blood dripping from his side to pool on the ground beneath his feet, the soldier let himself fall into a fighting stance again. “We don’t have to do this,” the man said, with a calmness that reminded the soldier of the Captain, but he had no choice now.

“Then let me go.”

“It’s not that simple.” The man began to say and before he even finished the last word, the soldier was moving forward. He was fast. Even wounded, he knew he was fast and it was all the flying man could do to dodge out of the way. His wings were tucked away, leaving nothing for the soldier to grab onto to swing him around like last time, but he was slower than the woman was. His movements were nowhere near as practiced or as smooth. The flying man didn’t aim for the wounded area like the woman had, refusing to exploit that weakness even though the soldier knew the flying man had seen it. The soldier didn’t care. It was the flying man’s funeral. 

He blocked the blows as best he could, taking one or two to the face before he managed to hit the flying man square in the chest, sending him off the side of the building. The soldier reached to grab the flying man again, meaning to pull him up, but the flying man’s wings had deployed and he was flying up and out of the soldier’s reach. 

Looking for a way to get out, the soldier heard the footsteps on the gravel of the roof, but before he could turn, the woman was on his back, a wire pulled tight against the soldier’s throat. It had to be the woman. She was saying something to him in Russian.

“Sdaisya i budet menee bol'no.” She murmured in his ear, her voice low enough that the soldier blinked and almost fell into line. Russian was something that only his handlers had spoken to him for so long that a very large part of him wanted to fall to his knees, to just give in. The woman pulled tighter on the cord on his throat and the soldier moved, reaching behind him to throw her. She was wise to this move though pressing her heels against his wound hard enough that he would have shouted if he had to breath to do so. She jerked on the cord, speaking louder this time as she repeated the Russian from before. 

_Surrender and it will hurt less._

The soldier faltered, one step back and even though he didn’t throw her, he kept one hand bunched in the woman’s clothes as if they were locked in some kind of bizarre embrace. Her heels were still digging into his stomach, making him gasp out the little bit of breath that he still had trapped in his lungs when he saw the Captain standing near the stairwell to the roof. He had no shield in his hand, Barnes thought to himself, forgetting that he had taken it from him and that it was sitting somewhere near his armor downstairs.

The Captain wasn’t wearing his armor either. Instead he was in a dusty blue shirt, looking for all the world like he’d never been hurt in the first place. Maybe it was a ghost, Barnes thought, the Captain coming to say goodbye to his friend, and there was half a smile on his lips as his shoulders slumped, his legs giving out as he fell backward. The woman shouted something in Russian, the Captain something in English, but Barnes couldn’t make out anything as the blackness closed in.

Steve reached his hand out to Bucky and Bucky tried to reach back, but the world tilted and Bucky was falling.

Falling again, but this time with a smile on his lips instead of a scream.

* * * * *

The first time that Bucky fell, there had been a mission to complete. A surety that he was gone and the knowledge that Steve would be dead too. There was so much running through his head at once that Steve couldn’t even begin to pick it apart, even now, but he knew one thing for certain. He had thought that Bucky was dead and because he’d thought that it wasn’t possible to survive that fall, he’d never tried to go after him. He’d never tried to find him again. What would be the point?

Finding him against all odds only to lose him over and over again didn’t sound like something that happened in real life. It felt like something that belonged in a Greek tragedy where the fates had decided to be unreservedly cruel for reasons that only they would ever be able to explain. Bucky was silent this time as he went over the edge. It was Steve who screamed, the sound raw and ripped from his throat as he rushed over to the edge. His foot was on the edge of the roof when Sam went swooping down in front of him, grabbing Natasha and yanking her up and away. She’d been stuck underneath Bucky, unable to free herself fast enough and when Sam yanked her free, Steve felt some of the tension leave him. Now for, Bucky.

Sam had been able to carry Steve before, he should have been able to carry Bucky, metal arm or no metal arm. Sam reached for Bucky, his fingers catching on the other man’s collar as he turned up the power of his wings. For a moment, one brief moment, it felt like they were going to make it. 

Bucky’s descent had slowed and Natasha was grimacing, but alive as she reached up with her other arm to help distribute her weight better, but then they were falling again and it was all Sam could do to slow it so they didn’t hit the ground at terminal velocity. Maybe ten feet above the ground, Sam let Bucky go. Both of his hands switched to holding Natasha, adjusting their descent so she could run along the ground before he dropped her off, coming to a running halt himself a little bit past both of them. Steve didn’t have time to see the rest. He was already running down the hallway, back down the stairwell leaping from one landing to another to get downstairs in less than a minute. 

Bucky was sprawled unconscious on the ground and Sam was with Natasha, helping her twist her arm back into place. “Dislocated,” she said when Steve glanced over at her. “Probably from when Sam caught me.”

“I could let you fall next time,” Sam raised an eyebrow at her and despite everything, Natasha smiled.

“I wasn’t complaining. Much.” She hissed out a breath when he managed to get her arm back to the way it was supposed to be rather than having it hanging limply at her side and she nodded her thanks, rubbing at her sore shoulder with her good hand. “You have a first aid kit in the car, right? Could you grab it for me?” She was looking at Steve, but when Steve didn’t respond, Sam put a hand on Natasha’s good shoulder and headed off toward the car himself. 

Steve was kneeling down beside Bucky, feeling for a pulse. There was so much blood, more than would have been there from just hitting the ground. Steve pulled Bucky’s shirt up, grimacing at the messy wound where the tracer was. “How many times did you hit him here?” Steve asked, not bothering to look up as Natasha crouched down beside him.

“As many as it took.” Natasha said, pushing Steve’s hands away and using a clean sheet of gauze to wipe up some of the blood. “The good thing about this is that with the wound already open like this, we don’t need to cut into him to get out the tracer.”

“Lucky us,” Steve muttered and Natasha handed over the forceps without prompting, doing her best to keep the area clean so Steve could see.

“You’ve done this before, right? I thought I read somewhere that you did surgery on an allied soldier back in World War II.” Natasha sounded too calm for this and while it irritated Steve, it also was helping to keep him calm. 

“Falsworth did the surgery. I just held him down.” Steve set his teeth as he dug the forceps into Bucky’s wound, feeling around until metal met metal. 

“Same kind of deal then.” Natasha glanced up at Sam as he crouched near the two of them, getting the antiseptic ready so they could clean the wound before they closed it. “Did he make it?”

“No, he died. Bullet had shattered and pierced his spleen. Not much we can do about that on the middle of a battlefield.” Steve got a good hold on the tracer, slowly pulling it out inch by inch until the entire thing was clear of the wound. Then he handed it over to Natasha to check.

She turned the tracer around in her hands, frowning at it. “It looks whole to me. Lucky.”

“Yeah, lucky.” Steve echoed, his tone much the same as before as he pulled Bucky’s shirt up more, looking at the still healing bullet holes. Morita wasn’t a bad shot under pressure, it seemed and Steve almost could have smiled, thinking about the Commando that he knew and the grandson that he’d just met. “Think he got these out before they started to heal?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” The mirth was gone from Natasha’s face as she handed the forceps back to Steve and scalpel in hand, she started to cut open the partially healed injuries.

It felt like it took so much more time than it actually had. They knew that they couldn’t take Bucky to a hospital, not with all that had happened, and while Steve knew that, a part of him wanted to just go ahead and do it. Bucky needed better care than they could give. “You have to keep him here.” Natasha said, shrugging her shoulders. “And even here’s risky. Don’t stay longer than you need to.”

“You’re not going to stay?” Sam asked, grunting as he helped Steve pull Bucky up enough for Steve to gather Bucky into his arms. 

“The less I know about this, the better. There’s a lot going on and I’ve got my own stuff to deal with.” Natasha flashed them both an apologetic smile. “If it’s serious, call me. Or come find me at the Avengers Facility. I’ll be around, but…”

“This isn’t your fight.” Steve said, nodding his head at Natasha, and gratitude showed on her face briefly before she nodded her head. 

“No, it’s not.”

Sam had gone with her to drop her off near a city, somewhere where she could catch a plane, and Steve had been left alone with Bucky, trying to find a good place where he could put him. There was no place in the building that was secure enough to hold him, and in the end, Steve had to forgo comfort for safety. There was a giant machine in one of the rooms, one that looked like it could act like a vise, and Steve propped Bucky up against it, bringing the machine down until Bucky’s metal arm was pinned between it. Steve didn’t want to do it and if it had been just him, maybe he would have have risked it. As it was, he couldn’t know if Bucky would try to hurt Sam because he didn’t trust him. 

It was nearly an hour before Sam came back, and Steve stood in the doorway of the room, watching Bucky slowly regain consciousness. 

“Buck,” he called out softly, steeling himself for an answer that he wasn’t sure he was ready for. “Do you remember me?”

“Your mom’s name was Sarah.” Bucky’s voice was soft, scratchy and hoarse from the damage that Widow had done to his neck. “You used to stuff newspaper in your shoes.”

Steve’s eyebrows raised, his entire expression softening. “You remember that?”

Bucky nodded, slowly, looking up at Steve with eyes that were so different than they had been when they’d driven together, even if they were just as lost. “You said so. Before.” He stopped, his face scrunching up as if it hurt him to try to recall it. “We were at this motel. I can’t remember the name of it.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Steve said and despite himself, he moved closer to Bucky, crouching down in front of him despite Sam’s whispered warning. 

“It’s not an actual memory. Just you telling me about it.” Bucky sucked in a sharp breath, his eyes wide as he looked up at Steve, trying to shift away before the machine’s grip on his arm stopped him short. “It’s not real.”

“The only thing that matters, Buck, is that you remembered something.” Steve’s voice was soft, his heart squeezing so tight that he thought it might burst. “The rest will come.”

Bucky looked away from Steve. Down to the ground and away before he sucked in a sharp breath and met Steve’s eyes again.

“What if I don’t want it to?”

* * * * *

“You’ll have to understand that we’re in a very particular situation right now. Maybe some of you thought that because SHIELD was taken down, the future of HYDRA was secured, but we’d woven ourselves so tightly into SHIELD, we were affected as badly as them when the files were uploaded. There are still people combing over our files and using them for their own gain. Some countries have already entered into an arms race, using our technology for their own, pathetic gains. We are losing agents left and right, agents who were revealed by the data leak. 

“I won’t lie to you, gentleman, times are tougher than ever. That’s why you, all of you, are so important. Hydra’s leaders are practically impotent now, working in their separate little cells and trying to pull threads from behind the scenes. They are nothing. They’re rats too stupid to even know that the ship is sinking, never mind leave it. But you? If you’re here then it’s because you know we can bring Hydra back to what it was. Not by pulling strings or by forming a symbiotic relationship with a government agency like we did with SHIELD. 

“The time has come to strike out on our own. We’ll take the resources we need and hide ourselves away until we’re strong enough for to remake the world in our own image.

“Johann Schmidt tried to take the world by force and was brought down by a group of commandos. 

“Arnim Zola helped Hydra to grow as a parasite within SHIELD. We were always meant to separate from the host, but we waited too long, and Steve Rogers turned our own weapons against us. 

“And me? Well, I just feel lucky that the world felt fit to give Alexander Pierce a second chance. The fact that I’m here just proves how much more I have to do before I kick the bucket.

“All of you who are sitting here in front of me are here for a reason. I hand picked you for your skills, for your deadliness, for your brains. 

“Hydra shaped the 20th century, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone else shape the 21st.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> Chapter title and lyrics taken from [The Emotion by BØRNS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_CfRxf3kPI)


	5. Way Down We Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even if it was selfish, Bucky didn’t want Steve to see what the war had already cost him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me. 
> 
> (Updated Bi-Weekly)

_Oh, father tell me, we get what we deserve  
Oh, we get what we deserve_

This could have been the perfect day.

The truck stop that Steve had decided to fill up at was noisy, filled with people desperately trying to find a snack they wanted to eat, truckers seeking comfort off the road, and even had a small chapel over in the corner of the stop. Steve stood silent, his fingers curled tight around the gas pump as he listened to the movement of the people around him. The sun was still high enough in the sky that it didn’t feel like night was coming yet, and Steve spared one last glance for his borrowed SUV before he went into the gas station.

Steve picked up some soda and chips, something that looked like it was meant to be a sandwich, and a handful of chocolate bars before he headed to the cash register to pay, trying his hardest to not rock back and forth on his heels as he waits for the items to be rung in.  
Everything was dumped into a plastic bag, handed over with a perfunctory “have a nice day,” and Steve nodded his head, returning the sentiment before he headed back to his SUV. 

It’s a miracle that no one’s recognized him yet, or maybe they had and the true miracle was that no one had said anything to him. Since SHIELD’s files had been dumped, it seemed like there were always people finding him. Their lives hadn’t been their own since that day and Steve, for the most part, had grown used to not being able to go more than a couple days without someone recognizing him, but it wasn’t him that he was thinking of.

Steve had always been more worried about his friends than himself, and the man in the SUV was Steve’s friend even if he didn’t consider Steve to be his friend in return.

“Hey,” Steve said as he slid into the driver’s seat. Bucky was sitting in the back seat, not wanting to sit up front with Steve for some reason that Bucky hadn’t wanted to share. Steve looked over his shoulder at Bucky before handing over the bag of food. “I got us some stuff for the road. It’s not dinner, but it’ll hold us over until we get somewhere where there’s half-decent food.”

What was it like to wake up in a new world? Steve tried to think back to those first days after he’d been defrosted, but they were a muddled blur to him. The details of those days eluded him, buried under the enormity of what his mind was trying to accept. Steve hadn’t even been out of the ice for a month when Loki had waged war on the world, and he’d fallen into step after that, a soldier no matter what time he found himself in. So all those details about the things that he’d done in those first couple weeks were haphazardly strewn across Steve’s mind. 

The ache that had settled in his chest, curling round his heart like barbed wire, was easy for Steve to remember though. 

It was the one thing that took no effort to recall at all. 

Bucky didn’t say anything at first. He simply took the bag from Steve with a nod of his head, not bothering to open it just yet. “Take a look,” Steve said as he started the car, shifting it into gear and pulling out of the rest station. That had been an order. Steve never meant to give them - he’d been warned against giving too many of them by Natasha, but it was a hard habit for him to break. Still, at least it had Bucky looking inside of the bag and pulling out the sandwich. The radio was playing softly in the background, tuned so that it was just loud enough to break the silence that would have stretched between them otherwise, and the crack of the container that held the sandwich echoed like thunder throughout the vehicle. 

Any other time, Steve might have laughed. 

Bucky was slower to do things now - he moved as if he was in a daze sometimes, his eyes vacant and his shoulders slumped. Other times, he was just as slow, but it was because he was sizing Steve up. Bucky’s gaze would sharpen, his eyes would narrow, and he would wait for Steve to walk in front of him, to expose his back, because Bucky was sure as hell not going to. 

Steve let his mind wander back to right before they’d found Bucky in that abandoned building. They knew where he was thanks to Clint’s tracker, but Natasha had suggested they stop to get Steve some food. It was over bags of burgers that they had pulled out a small box of files, careful not to drip grease on them. 

“He’s going to think that you’re his handler if you’re not careful.”

Natasha had said that to Steve, the same day they’d finally found Bucky in that abandoned building after Steve got out of the hospital. They’d been sifting through the old Hydra files, trying to find something, anything that would help them understand what Bucky had gone through. Nat hadn’t even wanted to come with them originally. She’d come because it was only Sam who’d been able to come with Steve. 

“I guess I’ll stick around,” Nat had said, a small smile playing on her lips as if that had been her plan from the very beginning. “Sam can play chauffeur while we play detectives.”

“I’ve always wanted my own personal Doctor Watson.” Steve said and Natasha raised an eyebrow at him, her lips pursed. 

“Which incarnation of Watson?”

“Pick one you like,” Steve had shrugged, and Natasha had laughed, muttering something about laws under her breath as they’d settled down for a riveting afternoon of watching a flashing dot on a Clint’s phone screen. 

She had talked about the Red Room to Steve that day, in bits and pieces as if it were a story that Natasha never wanted to be truly stitched together. Natasha sketched an outline with offhand comments and left Steve to fill in the blanks. The Red Room got inside the head and never let a person go, not really. Natasha would wake up from dreams of ballet performances that she’d never danced juxtaposed with the whiz of bullets past her body, the impact of her fists against a man’s jaw. She would wake up not sure if she had ever truly escaped from the room. She had been a dancer once, loved by millions. 

And now Natasha was a rehabilitated assassin, standing beside superheroes to save the world. 

Was it any wonder she woke up some mornings, questioning whether she had ever made it out of that place? 

Natasha had left soon after Bucky had been found. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help Steve, she simply needed to know how to help herself first, and she had left with Steve’s blessing, leaving him and Sam to figure out what they were going to do. Sam had wanted to keep him there for a couple days, to make sure that the aggressive behavior was gone, but Steve, remembering how they’d been when they’d been traveling together before had wanted to give Bucky a chance. In the end, Steve had won out and they’d rented a place under a fake name and with cash. Sam had gone ahead to secure the location, promising that he’d be out of the way by the time that Bucky and Steve actually got there. After all, he’d be flying while the other two drove. 

It was for the best, Steve told himself, only half sure he believed it. If he could isolate Bucky and they could spend time together without hunting Hydra, it would be better for him. 

Steve was jolted from his reverie when Bucky nudged him, looking down to see that what he was feeling was the sandwich container against his arm. The sandwich was back inside of it, a large bite taken out of one of the halves. “Not hungry?” Steve asked, raising an eyebrow and Bucky let out a huff of breath that could have been a laugh. 

Taking the sandwich, Steve took a bite of it and nearly choked. He rolled down the window, spitting the half-chewed food out of the window and letting the sandwich container fall into his lap as he wiped at the back of his mouth with one hand. Bucky let out another huff of breath, miles closer to a laugh than the last one had been. “That tasted terrible,” Steve said, his eyes watering, and Bucky rustled through the bag to pull out a chocolate bar instead.

“I know,” Bucky replied, his tone mild, and Steve laughed, shaking his head.

Neither of them had said much after that. Even when they’d pulled up to the house where they’d be spending the next month, Bucky didn’t say anything. He simply pulled his bag from the back and slung it over his shoulder before walking into the house. Steve checked the perimeter of the house, noting the entrances before he followed Bucky inside. 

He let Bucky choose the room that he wanted, unsurprised when his friend said that he wanted the smaller one. Steve had been like that too after he’d woken up, and he hadn’t gone through anything like Bucky had. 

“If you need anything, let me know.” Steve said, leaning against the doorway, and when Bucky didn’t answer, Steve walked back to his room. He pulled out his new phone, what Nat had called a ‘burner phone’, and sent a text to let her and Sam know that he was alright. Steve thought about lying down and trying to get some rest. He’d been driving most of the day, but he pushed himself up onto his feet again instead and walked around the house to check it for bugs.

It was unlikely that anyone had been able to get here fast enough to bug the house, but Steve couldn’t be complacent. Complacency killed people, and with how paranoid Bucky acted sometimes, Steve sometimes felt like it would only take one good shove to send his friend over the edge.

To send him falling down away from Steve once more.

* * * * *

For Bucky, the world felt brighter than it had before. There was light everywhere, harsh and unforgiving, sharp in the way that the colors would pierce the haze in Bucky’s mind. The sky shone, blinding, even when it was overcast and grey, humming with the promise of the light that it was hiding. Today was no different than any other day.

The car ride had felt like it had taken forever, and Bucky had sat quietly in the back of the car the entire time. It was easier than being in the front seat where the Captain could have easily reached him, better to be in the back where Bucky could keep an eye on him for both of their sakes. All this time spent in a car and here they were, in front of a house that looked like it had seen better days.

They were in Pennsylvania, Bucky knew that much from the signs he’d seen on the way in. There was a lake behind Bucky that he didn’t know the name of, but that stretched off into the distance. The other side of the lake was a smudge of faded green and browns and Steve stood beside Bucky for a moment to take in the view before he tilted his head back toward the house.  
“Come on, I’ll show you where our rooms are.”

The house was nothing special, but at the same time, it was a palace. Already, the light of the day was filtering out of the room, and the shadows stretched themselves high on the wall. There were doors here, doors that opened and closed with a click rather than a clunk, ones that were so thin they wouldn’t be able to hold anyone out, and yet felt more safe than all the other doors in the world.

Bucky had looked at the two rooms that were meant for sleeping. There was one that was open and spacious, the bed big enough for two people and with large windows that let light stream in. The other room was smaller, crammed with furniture and with only two windows instead of the four of the other room. Bucky took one look at the smaller room and walked inside it to place the small bag of clothes that Steve had bought him on the bed. 

The smaller room was shabbier too, with scuffs on the wall and dents in the door.

Bucky reached out with his metal hand, tracing a dent in the back of the door. A fight, he thought to himself and wondered who had one. The door had buckled under the force of the blow, snapping inward and hollowing.

People did that too.

Bucky shook his head, stepping back from the door to look at the rest of the room. There were no chairs in the room aside from a small one by the desk, and Bucky walked over to it, slumping down onto it. It was old and poorly made. Bucky could tell by how it creaked as he rested his weight on it, but it didn’t crack underneath him, and Bucky sat as still as he could.  
He rested his hands on his knees, the wall blurring out of focus as his mind drifted. The sun was setting outside the large window, but Bucky found that he couldn’t focus on it for long. Each time he turned his head, he was drawn back to staring at the wall, at the long crack that ran from ceiling to floor. The owner of the house had tried to cover it up, hanging a homemade quilt over it, but Bucky had pulled that down moments after he’d stepped into the room.

It was better to see the flaws, to know what was behind the decorations, than to pretend that the flaws weren’t there.

Mission report.

Bucky’s shoulders stiffened even as his jaw went slack. The room changed before his eyes, elongated and became something different, darker. The knick knacks had been replaced with trays of surgical equipment, a single light hanging forlornly from the ceiling above. The doctors would be coming soon to take him apart piece by piece until everything melted away and only the weapon was left. The Winter Soldier was needed, and maybe after this last time there’d be an end to it.

Blink and the world came back to itself.

Bucky swallowed down the lump in his throat, looking around the room and trying to put things in order in his mind. He pushed himself up from the chair, then turned it around to place it back underneath the desk.

The room he was in was small, full of tacky little figurines that had a thin layer of dust coating their surface. There was a small porcelain girl in a flowing yellow dress on the table near Bucky’s bed. She had a crank in her back, and when Bucky turned it, the girl spun in place to the sound of some kind of waltz. He watched for a moment, his head tilting to one side before he was moving again, ignoring the amateur paintings on the wall and looking in the mirror.

It had been easier when a stranger had stared back at him.

The face was familiar now, and Bucky knew how many lines were around his eyes, the stubble that he kept meaning to shave and forgetting about. Bucky knew that the dark circles around his eyes were his own, not caked-on layers of paint. The stranger was the man that Bucky had seen in the museum, venerated as a hero for dying a noble death. The smiling, only slightly haunted, ghost of James Buchanan Barnes that flickered in and out of Bucky’s mind like a sputtering candle.

The room was small, but Bucky didn’t mind small. Small was defensible. Small was safe. It was better than anything he’d had for as long as he could remember. Maybe the Captain knew of somewhere better where Bucky had lived, but he didn’t care enough to ask. Later, he might pester the Captain with question after question about who they were and what had happened.  
Bucky hadn’t done it yet, but he wasn’t ready to rule out the possibility.

There was a knock at the door and Bucky turned his head toward it, his posture relaxed as he took the two steps needed to reach the door and pulled it open. “Hey, Buck.” Steve’s voice was soft even as he frowned, gaze drifting downward. “What’re you doing with that knife?”

“Nothing,” Bucky looked down at the knife he couldn’t remember drawing, frowning at it much in the same way that Steve had frowned at him. Then Steve wrapped his fingers around Bucky’s wrist, his hold tight enough that Bucky would have to jerk out of his grip if he wanted to move his knife hand. “I was looking at the room,” Bucky said and after a long moment, Steve released him, stepping back so Bucky could put the knife away again. “It’s nice.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Steve was still frowning, but he looked around the room instead. “If there’s anything you need…”  
“I’ll ask,” Bucky said and Steve raised an eyebrow at him. “I haven’t forgotten that much,” he brushed past the Captain and out into the narrow hallway that separated their rooms from the rest of the house.

“Why’d you move the quilt?”

“Didn’t like it.”

“And you covered the desk with it because…”

“It’s an ugly desk.” Bucky shrugged his shoulders and Steve let out a soft laugh. When Bucky turned his head, he could see Steve looking underneath the quilt to check for himself and again, Bucky shrugged.

The main room was larger. There were monitors on one side of it and a kitchen in another. Rooms had been separated once, all of them in their proper place, but that wasn’t the way that houses were built now. The kitchen bled into everything other room, its dark wooden panels contrasting with the lightness of the stone.

“Do you want something to drink?” Steve said as he came up behind him, but Bucky didn’t answer. Instead he just watched as Steve poured himself a glass of water and sipped at it. If having Bucky stare at him bothered the Captain at all, he never showed it.

Finally, Bucky moved again, wandering toward the windows and pressing his fingers against the glass.

“Is there enough time to go outside?”

Steve blinked a couple times before his expression softened. Bucky could hear the arguments going back and forth in the other’s head, but eventually Steve nodded.

“Yeah, Buck. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Bucky had never wanted to come here. Steve had been the one to suggest it, and Bucky had simply not protested coming.  
The city wasn’t any better, but at least it provided more distraction than being out here did. Bucky walked along the lake’s shoreline, Steve at his side. The wind sent his hair whipping around his face, but Bucky barely even felt it. “Cold?” Steve asked, and Bucky turned his head to look at the other man. Steve wore a jacket, but he didn’t seem to need it any more than Bucky did.

“No,” Bucky said in reply, turning away before Steve could finish frowning. 

He’d thought he was Russian before. Bucky could remember that much. He’d spoken in Russian and been spoken to in Russian often. His trigger words had been in Russian, his handlers in the Red Room had been Russian. Even when Hydra wiped him, Bucky’s conditioning was from the Red Room. They couldn’t get rid of that completely.

One time Bucky had run away. 

He wasn’t sure why he could remember that. The places that he had gone when he’d run away were hazy, mere fragments of a what could have been a dream, but that first heady breath of freedom followed by the fear of what was to come stood out in Bucky’s mind. When he’d been standing on the shore, the same feelings had run into each other, fighting for dominance inside of him as he looked down at the Captain, waiting until he started to breathe. 

Bucky didn’t want to think about what he would have done if the Captain hadn’t coughed and spit up the water in his lungs.

One time, Yuri had run away.

It was the last name that Bucky could remember. The last name that hadn’t been told to him over and over again until he cracked down the middle. Yuri. A Russian name, the name of an everyman who could have been a hero. His name had been Yuri, and before Hydra had recruited him, he’d been part of a project that would have saved the world. 

A lie, but a comfortable one that Bucky let himself slip into sometimes. 

Yuri was a good man, after all. He’d volunteered to become an experiment to help people.

Scratch that. Yuri wasn’t a good man, he was a God-damn hero. 

“Am I Russian?” Bucky asked, and he didn’t need to turn to know that Steve was frowning. 

“You were born in New York ‘bout a block away from me.” 

Bucky knew that. Of course, he knew it, but there was a difference between knowing and wanting to know. It was easier to let himself get whisked away to a world where all the things that he’d done could be excused by all the things he’d been told. 

“Bucky?” Steve reached out to touch his shoulder lightly, and Bucky jerked away.

“Don’t.”

He only half listened as Steve said something that sounded apologetic, kicking out of his boots and leaving them on the cold sand as he moved toward the water. He stripped off the t-shirt that Steve had lent him and tossed it to one side, striding toward the water. Steve called out his name, but Bucky ignored it as he strode forward until he was waist deep in the water. Soldier or not, Bucky could feel the cold biting into his skin. It was November. There would be ice on the lake soon enough, but he swallowed it down and dove underneath the water. 

The cold was within him and without as Bucky swam out further. He would break the surface of the water before he dove back down again, down into the welcoming dark. Ice was hell, it was the death of everything, and the end of all that Bucky knew. All of the things he could remember, those hazy recollections were book-ended by the ice and the cold. 

The sound of the water was different from the crackling that the cryo-chamber would make when it froze him. It was always quick. Breathe in and by the time Bucky breathed out, he was gone. 

They’d wake him up, melt him, but even then that cold still remained. They’d made Winter a part of him, Bucky knew.  
Because warmth was for people.

Fingers banded around his wrist and burned like a brand. Bucky tried to yank himself away and instead was jerked back up to the surface of the water. He spluttered, pushing his hair out of his eyes with his metal hand and half expected to see one of the scientists peering at him, leaning over him with those pleased little smiles. 

Instead there was Steve, fully dressed and shivering from the cold. “Please,” he managed to get out, his fingers tight around Bucky’s wrist. “We’ll freeze if we stay out here longer.”

Maybe Steve would freeze, but not Bucky.

He nodded his head and Steve let go of him so they could both swim to shore. Neither of them spoke, and the only sound was the splash of the water against them as they moved back. Steve was still shivering when they reached the shallows, rubbing his arms in an attempt to bring some heat back into them. 

“God, it’s cold.” He managed to get out, teeth chattering and Bucky tossed the t-shirt that he had been wearing at the Captain so he could dry off his hair at least. “It’s like being under the ice again.”

Bucky’s smile was small. It didn’t reach his eyes.

He picked up his boots and led the Captain back to the house. Steve disappeared into his room, only coming out with towels and handing them over to Bucky before disappearing again. Bucky looked down at his wrist where Steve had grabbed him, half-expecting to see the impression of his fingers there, seared into his skin like a brand. 

The next morning, he went swimming again. Steve sat on the shore and watched him until he came back out of the water, and Bucky could almost hear all the questions that Steve wasn’t asking. All of the whys that the Captain wasn’t ready to talk to him about. 

“Does it feel good?” Steve asked as he handed Bucky a towel and they walked back into the house. “Being that cold, does it feel good?”

“No.” Bucky’s voice was flat and Steve heard the warning in his tone, tucking away any questions he might have had remaining to make them coffee instead. “It doesn’t feel good.”

But at the very least, it was familiar.

* * * * *

Coming back to Brooklyn after fighting Germans in Europe was the strangest thing that Bucky could have thought to do. The waves on the boat back had been choppy, a week of pitched rises and falls that had had the soldiers with weaker stomachs spending most of the voyage throwing up into the ocean. Bucky had moved among them, helping out his own squad when he could. 

Before the war, he’d helped his mother to take care of his sister and both of them had helped Sarah Rogers to take care of her always sick son. It had become second nature to watch and to soothe. Bucky’s mother had hoped that maybe, somehow, with enough studying that Bucky could become a doctor. His grades had always been good. It was easy for him to soak up information like a sponge, unlike Steve who was often distracted either by the pictures in his head or the aches in his body. Steve had to put the effort forward and Bucky could still imagine that concentration, the crease of Steve’s brow as he frowned at the blackboard. People had thought that Steve was angry and maybe he was, but it wasn’t at them, or what they were learning. 

Steve had always been frustrated with himself and his own shortcomings. A body that was weaker than than the rest and a mind that had trouble just falling into line and doing what it was told. Steve was a creative thinker, Bucky had taken to calling him when other kids in school had tried to make fun of him. He still thought just as long and hard as anyone, it was just that his method and sometimes his conclusions were different. 

The ocean liner that had delivered Bucky back home had probably once been the toast of the elite, stripped down to carry the soldiers back and forth. Speed was important, they needed to keep moving. Bucky had stood out on the decks, wearing his jacket against the chill that always seemed to be present in the middle of the ocean. There were German U-boats out there somewhere, unseen until they broke the surface and rammed a torpedo up your ass. Bucky had heard that in some of the sinkings, there had been no survivors - and why would there have been? Even if there was a chance to rescue a few soldiers from the wreck, knowing that there was a U-boat in the area would be enough to warn any sane captain away. 

The rich would have had parties here once, they would have sipped at expensive wines and smoked cigars. Bucky sat on the deck and smoked cigarette after cigarette, ignoring the chill to lean back and finally get some space to himself. He was sick of the cramped little rooms that they’d been crammed into and the constant smell of bile that filled the air. There was nowhere for the smell to go, he thought to himself, laughing a little under his breath as he thought about how he’d tell Steve how lucky he was to have been spared this trip. 

Home.

There were soldiers who spoke of it as if it were a talisman, a prayer. 

They spoke of it with a reverence that had hope welling up within Bucky’s chest that home would be a balm to the wounds that he’d suffered, the ones that couldn’t be bandaged and salved. The ones who had been on leave before were quieter though, keeping to themselves. Looking at them, Bucky knew. Even if he didn’t want to admit it yet, he knew that being home wouldn’t solve his problems. 

Bucky’s mother and Steve had met him on the docks and Bucky had done his best to smile, even as his eyes scanned a home that didn’t seem familiar any longer. 

There had been the usual round of visiting friends, but Bucky tired of it quickly. Before, he would have been fine to go out and paint the town red, but after a couple days of visiting, he kept to his room. There were so many flags in the windows that it was a wonder that anyone could even look out of them, and despite the odd grumble about how hard it was to get certain things, most people were optimistic about the war. It was a sea of patriotism outside of the door, and Bucky stood outside of it, watching it soak into the skin of the people he loved the most. Steve’s eyes would light up when he saw the recruitment centers, his desire to serve his country tempered by the frustration that he most likely wouldn’t be allowed to. 

He would hear his mother having tea with her friends, all of them talking about how proud they were of their boys overseas and Bucky wanted to tell them all off: _We’re dyin’ out there. We’re dyin’ in droves, and all the pride in the world ain’t gonna save our skin._

The ladies that Bucky went out with liked him in uniform, they wanted a cute soldier to play with while their own boyfriends were out on the battlefield. A soldier meant that nothing was permanent, and they liked it. Bucky could play along with that, his eyes crinkling at the edges as he talked to them about what it was like to be in a different country, leaving out the battlefields where they could have stacked the corpses up like wood and built a damn house out of all the casualties. There were times when he could even fool himself into believing what he was saying, in the heroic feats of the men around him and the tales of nations battling together against an evil whose like the world had never seen before. 

It was his second day of being shut in his room, not leaving except to canoodle at night with whichever girl would take him, when Steve came to see him. There was still that defiant set to Steve’s shoulders as he walked into the room that Bucky had taken over as his own. Bucky was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling as he threw up a baseball and caught it again in one hand. Steve, knowing his limits when it came to his curved spine sat on the bed first before setting his jaw and sliding slowly down onto the floor. “Don’t be an ass,” Bucky said, not even bothering to look at him. It didn’t matter what he said. Steve would do what Steve wanted to do, consequences to his health be damned.

“I’m not the one being an ass.”

Steve’s words brought Bucky up short and he swallowed down the bitter retort that rose up in his throat. “What can I say? I learned from the best.” He laughed, holding the ball in one hand before he gently lobbed it at Steve who caught it with both hands, nearly fumbling the catch before he got a good hold on it. “What’s on your mind, Stevie?”

“Let’s get out of here. You don’t wanna spend your entire time back just moping around in this room, do you?” Steve looked down at the ball, his fingers tracing the lacing of it. 

“Considered it.”

“Well unconsider it.”

There was a tone to Steve’s voice that Bucky didn’t have the strength to argue against. _I’m tired, Stevie._ He wanted to say. _Let me rest._

But neither of them said anything, and eventually Bucky pushed himself up into a sitting position. Steve’s expression was earnest in its concern, carefully studying Bucky’s face as if that would give him the answers he wanted to the questions that he still couldn’t bring himself to ask. “Let’s hit the gym, then.” Bucky said finally, flashing his friend a grin. Sit here too long and he might end up spilling all of it to Steve.

That he didn’t want to fight the damn war any more, but that he knew that he had to go back. That he didn’t want to stay here either. That what Bucky wanted to do the most was just grab Steve and run so far away that the war couldn’t even touch them. If that made him a coward, Bucky figured that he’d paid his dues. 

“You’re out of practice. Aren’t you worried I’ll whup your ass?” Steve was smiling now, and Bucky knew he had him, pushing himself to his feet before he held out a hand to help Steve to his.

“I’m shakin’ in my boots, pal.” Bucky drawled and he turned away from Steve so the other wouldn’t see him before Bucky could fumble his mask into place. When he turned he was all smiles and light-hearted jabs, ready for an entirely different kind of battlefield. 

Even if it was selfish, Bucky didn’t want Steve to see what the war had already cost him.

* * * * *

For the first week after they unfroze him, Steve tried to catch up with all that he’d missed.

Steve turned over the telegram in his hand, holding it between two fingers. It’s been preserved for years now, carefully kept locked behind glass cases and muted lights. The only reason that Steve was allowed to touch it at all was because everything of the life that he had lived. When history reared its head again and the dead walked, it was hard to argue that Steve didn’t have the right to what had belonged to him and his friends.

For the most part, Steve had no interest in keeping any of them. They were relics of the past, memories of a place that Steve would never be able to go again, and whatever people said about the familiar being soothing, they’d never had to look around them to realize that the entire world had changed. Better to dive in headfirst, Steve had thought, doing away with the old to embrace the new.

_MRS. WINIFRED C BARNES_

_THE SECRETARY OF WAR ASKS THAT I ASSURE YOU OF HIS DEEP SYMPATHY IN THE LOSS OF YOUR SON SERGEANT JAMES B BARNES_

But sometimes the old just had their hooks sunk in too deep. Steve resisted the urge to crumple the telegram in his fist and instead tossed it down onto the table. Most of them had made it. Against all odds, the commandos had survived. Bucky and Steve had been the only ones lost in battle, an end that Dugan had called “fitting” in a later interview.

“They were always together. Always being crazy sons of… mothers,” Dugan had laughed a little then, catching himself at the last moment. “It fits that they’d be together here too, don’t it?

“I’m not sayin’ that I’m happy about what happened.” The tape crackles and Steve can hear Dugan’s voice break before he coughs to cover it up. “Course I’d want ‘em both here, but if they had to go…

“Going one after the other is fitting.”

Steve looked up when Fury entered the room, not saying a word as the director moved to the video screen and turned off the documentary that was playing. “Why’re you doing this to yourself, Cap?” Fury took his seat across the table from Steve, turning the chair backward so he could rest his arms on the back of it. “All this, didn’t you say that you didn’t want to see it?”

“I didn’t.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“There are lots of things that I haven’t wanted to do, that I’ve done anyway.” Steve looked down at the telegram on the table, the block letters carving into his skull.

_…ASSURE YOU OF HIS DEEP SYMPATHY IN THE LOSS…_

“This isn’t a mission, this isn’t something that you need to stand and witness.” Fury followed Steve’s gaze and took the telegram into his own hand before he set it back in the box that the Smithsonian had sent over. “No one would think less of you for not looking back.”

Steve didn’t answer at first, leaning back in his chair and taking in the half-unpacked box. If he was going to be honest to himself, he didn’t want to see what else was in there. He’d already flipped through some of the books that the museum had helpfully provided for him and started underlining each lie he found. There were a surprising amount of them, not that Steve had ever put much thought into how his life would be remembered, but they really did like to make him into a hero.

The first lie that Steve had found had called Captain America fearless.

The second had been about Bucky volunteering for the war.

_…IN THE LOSS OF…_

“There’s one person.” Steve said after what must have been a long time because Fury blinked at him, thrown off guard for the first time since Steve had woken up. “One person who would think less of me if I didn’t look back.”

“Oh yeah?” Fury raised an eyebrow, peering at Steve with his one good eye.

“Yeah. Me.”

Bucky was seventy years dead now. Bucky’s parents were gone too and had been buried in a small cemetery in Brooklyn beside the empty grave that should have held their son. Rebecca was 87 years old and had lived an entire lifetime while Steve had been under the ice. She’d met a nice man, fallen in love, and had the kids she’d never thought she’d wanted. She’d watched as those kids had kids of their own.

Somehow Rebecca, little Becca who had badgered Steve to read to her when he was little, was nearing the end of a very long life.

Bucky had been dead for nearly half a year before Steve died, but somehow waking up again had made the loss of him feel new again. There were times when Steve would forget, walking into a room with that hopeful rise in his chest only to have the truth sink in once more. Bucky was the ghost haunting the corners of his vision, disappearing by the time that Steve turned to look at where he had been. He was the creaking of the floorboards at night and the laughter that Steve swore he could hear when his apartment grew too quiet.

_…IN THE LOSS…_

Steve stood up without saying anything else, packing away everything that had been sent to him back into a box. This was ancient history to people now. Last century, before there’d been computers and portable phones, before cars had broken the sound barrier, and humans had walked on the moon.

Before airplanes had been used to travel around the world by everyday people.

“What’re you here for, Fury?” It was Steve’s turn to raise an eyebrow when Fury slid a folder across the table. “A mission?”

“You that eager to get back into the action?” The director didn’t pull his hand away from the folder yet, looking up at Steve and fixing him with a searching gaze. “Get some rest. There’ll always be a fight somewhere else, and you’ve been through a lot.”

Steve didn’t say anything, meeting Fury’s stare without wavering, and finally the director let out a huff of breath, leaning forward to flip open the folder. So, not everyone had made it outside of him and Bucky. Falsworth was dead. Morita too. Steve pulled the file closer to him so he could read it before pushing it away.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Fury said, as direct as ever, but Steve barely heard him as he nodded his head. Instead the silence was roaring in Steve’s ears, drowning out anything else that Fury might have said. Steve looked at the man who had thawed him out, who had wrenched him from the death that Steve had so rightfully earned, and pulled him back into this chaotic, noisy world where everything that mattered was gone.

“Thanks,” Steve said, closing the file and setting it to one side so he could pack away the rest of what the museum had sent him. It was all too close still. One look at that telegram and it felt like Steve had gone right back to when he’d first lost Bucky. He’d run away, tried to hide, but they’d sent someone after him eventually. They always did, and Steve figured he should have guessed who they were going to send.

* * * * *

Steve had sat alone in the bombed out bar for hours before Peggy found him.

The ceiling had felt like it was on its last legs, and in some places, it had even torn open to reveal the murky gloom of the sky. The moon and stars had hidden themselves away, turned their faces toward another planet. One that wasn’t so cruel. One where people didn’t turn out in the millions to slaughter and enslave other people.

One where everyone came home.

The alcohol didn’t burn his throat, and although Steve’s stomach churned at the taste of it, two bottles hadn’t been enough to make him feel anything. The smoke of the bar burned the back of his throat, but Steve barely noticed as he poured himself another drink. Maybe this one would be the one, he thought to himself, not bothering to raise his glass in a toast.

It didn’t matter any more.

The alcohol wasn’t making him drunk, but he did feel sick and every time he retched, Steve emptied his stomach and started over again. His throat burned, his stomach was cramped, and Steve’s eyes watered from the alcohol fumes, but he still worked on downing each glass. Good. Let it hurt.

The cold had set in as soon as they’d taken Zola into custody. Bucky’s screams were still echoing in Steve’s ears as he gave the commandos their orders. Zola was still trying to explain when Steve handed him over to the Colonel, but he couldn’t even hear him. There had been people there, trying to talk to Steve, but he had pushed past them all.

Someone had convinced him to change. Steve couldn’t remember who, but by the time that he made his way into the bar, his combat gear was gone. There was a service, Steve remembered, someone had said that if Steve was ready that it would begin, but he’d never gone.

Maybe it had been postponed. Steve didn’t know and it was hard to bring himself to care.

A rushed service wasn’t enough to commemorate the life and death of James Barnes.

Fuck.

_If you’re reading this, then I’m gone and good riddance, really._

Steve picked up the bottle and threw it across the room as hard as he could. It exploded into shards of glass, scotch dripping down the wall and staining it a darker red. It as if a bomb had exploded, but just as quickly as it had, Steve was sitting back down, looking down at his hands and cursing under his breath. There had been a letter in Bucky’s personal effects, one addressed to Steve.

It had been nestled right in between the vials of medication and the well-used syringe that Bucky had hidden at the bottom of his bag.

The cold of the bar was seeping into Steve’s skin, and he could remember the way that the place had looked the last time he’d sat here. There had been people there, the noise so loud that it was hard to think over the laughter and general commotion. Bucky had been sitting on his own, nursing a drink when Steve had come over to recruit him. He’d taken it for granted then, that Bucky wouldn’t say no and that they’d be fighting side by side.

“Are you ready to follow 'Captain America' into the jaws of death?" Steve had said, a smile on his face that made him feel sick to his stomach when he thought of it now.

It had been his own little joke and how they would have laughed before all of this happened. Back in Brooklyn, with the heater wheezing and Steve buried in as many blankets as Bucky could find for him, how long would they have laughed at the idea of Steve leading an elite team in the army? Bucky would have cracked a rib guffawing at that, and if Steve had asked Bucky to come with him into the most dangerous areas of the war, Bucky probably would have called him an idiot or a punk.

The jaws had snapped shut now, and Steve ran his fingers over the worn paper of Bucky’s letter. It had been short; a couple paragraphs of orders and apologies, admonitions and warnings that Steve could hear Bucky muttering in his ear every time he looked back down at the paper.

_Go get wasted, Stevie. Drink until Dum Dum is beautiful._

Steve didn’t look up at first even though he heard the footsteps. Peggy stepped carefully, but high heels weren’t meant to be stealthy. The back of his eyes burned, but Steve blinked that away and sniffed a bit as he leaned forward, picking up the bottle to pour himself another glass.

“Dr. Erskine said that the serum wouldn't just affect my muscles, it would affect my cells. Create a protective system of regeneration and healing.” The radio was still playing, but Steve couldn’t make out any of the words. It was all just noise, stupid pointless noise that went in one ear and out the other. Even when Peggy stood beside him, watching him quietly, Steve couldn’t bring himself to lift his head. It took enough effort to stop his voice from cracking. “Which means, um, I can't get drunk.”

_And then when you’re so drunk that you can’t even see straight, you think about all the good that’s ahead of you. You’ve never looked back before, don’t start now._

“Did you know that?” Steve shook his head, and he kept his voice soft, soft enough that if Peggy had spoken his words would have been wash away, buried underneath her voice. A part of him wished that she would say something, put him out of his misery and just talk until he could figure himself out, or else tell him how to figure himself out. 

Peggy had explained it to him as she righted a tipped over chair and still, Steve had found it so damn hard to bring himself to look at her. The bar smelled like fire and ash, it smelled of decay so strongly that Steve had nearly choked when he first stepped into it, but he could barely smell it now. His body took care of him even when Steve didn’t want it to. A metabolism that burned four times faster than a regular human… It was all Steve would have wanted even a year ago. To be able to be strong, to be able to do something that would make a shred of difference. 

The strength that Steve had dreamed of all his life, the power to do real good and change the world just like Steve had always wanted to, and it didn’t matter.

None of it mattered.

The alcohol burned Steve’s throat, but didn’t cloud his mind or ease the sharp, stabbing pain in his chest. It hurt to breathe. Steve was used to not being able to breathe, but not like this.

His best friend was gone, dead, beyond Steve’s reach and it hurt so much that he could barely stand it.

_I want you to be the most bullheaded punk you’ve ever been and just charge straight ahead. Just head right toward that future I know you’ve got waiting for you. The one with your beautiful wife who I was gonna flirt with and your dumb kids I would have spoiled rotten._

Peggy was sitting there in front of him, talking about fault, and she looked so beautiful, but Steve couldn’t look. Not right now. Look too long and he’d split right down the middle, break into so many pieces that he wouldn’t be of any use to anyone. And Steve ached to believe what she was saying. 

That it wasn’t Steve’s fault, that there was nothing else that he could have done. He was Captain America, they had made him to be better than everyone else. He’d been designed to be the soldier who could do the impossible, and he’d failed at it. He’d failed at it, and Bucky had died for it. 

The sympathy was pulling at him, Peggy’s voice pulling at him, and it would have been so easy to move over to her and pull her into his arms. Steve could feel something real, he could lose himself in her even if it was just for a night and let her chase away the ghost that was tormenting Steve. But as much as it hurt, Steve didn’t want to let Bucky go yet. 

Once he let him go, that made it real. It meant that there would be no rising from the dead, no more miracles. Bucky would be dead, and Steve would never see him again for as long as he lived. 

So Steve steeled himself against Peggy’s sympathy, pushed it away, even as the backs of his eyes burned and the tears threatened to overwhelm him. He wouldn’t let himself weep, but he couldn’t stop all of them from falling and Steve wiped at his face with one hand in a pitiful attempt to hide. 

_I know you’re sad. I’m sorry about that._

Steve set his jaw, swallowed hard and - still unable to look at Peggy - he’d told her his plan. It was more of a threat than anything else, with no planning behind it aside from a burning need that wouldn’t be ignored. “I’m going after Schmidt,” he said, thinking about that skull-faced bastard who had set all of this in motion. He was the reason that Bucky had been captured, and him sending Zola off on that train was the reason that Bucky had died.

It was Schmidt’s weapons, Schmidt’s plan, Schmidt’s insanity, and Steve would burn nations to get to where the man was. Schmidt would watch everything fall apart just like Steve had, and then Steve would finish it. He’d make sure that there would be no more losses like James Barnes because of Schmidt. Not a single one.

“I’m not gonna stop until all of Hydra’s dead or captured,” Steve said. 

When Peggy spoke, he finally raised his head to look at her, the first stirrings of hope rising inside of him. He almost reached for her then, almost pulled her close, and he knew just looking at her that she wouldn’t say no if he asked her for comfort. If he’d asked if he could lean on her, Peggy would have let him, and it was that thought which had Steve pushing himself to his feet. 

“Sorry, but could I have some time?” he said, and Peggy nodded, murmuring that she would be back at the base before she started to walk away. She hesitated by the door, looking back. 

“Steve.”

He looked up at her, his stomach twisting itself into knots even as his heart felt that stab of pain. “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to ask.” Her voice was soft, and Steve couldn’t bring himself to say the words that were sticking in his throat. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

Steve wished he could believe that, but before he could say anything, Peggy was gone. 

_And if I’m only gonna make you sad, then forget about me if you can. I don’t mind, I promise._

Most of the building was in shambles, but the bar area itself was remarkably intact, and Steve picked his way around the wreckage until he could search behind the bar for a tin. Any tin would do. He picked up a metal cigarette case that had been discarded on the ground, pocketing the cigarettes to give to the commandos before he opened the case and laid it on the bar. 

The last drawing in Steve’s sketchbook had been one of Bucky, half finished and without enough detail to make out who had been in the picture, but Steve knew. It had been their apartment back in Brooklyn, the one that they’d shared with four other friends in order to make ends meet. Out of the six of them, every one of them had gone to war. Three enlisted, two were drafted, and one stupid idiot volunteered for an experiment to become a secret weapon. 

Bucky stood by the stove, eggs in a frying pan and with light streaming through the window. There were stains on the walls that Steve could still remember, the wallpaper peeling away where it met the ceiling. Bucky had been laughing in the drawing, but Steve couldn’t remember at what. It had been a promise of going home that had prompted Steve to pick up his pencil, and it was the promise of going home that he’d bury today.

Reaching up, Steve pulled off the cross that he wore around his neck and held it in his hand for a long moment. His mother had bought this for him. It had been one of the last things she’d given him before she died, and Steve bowed his head as he placed it in the case beside his drawing and the letter that Bucky had left for him. If all went well with the war, he’d come back one day. Steve made that promise to himself. If he made it through the war, he’d come back and get the case back, but for now… 

Steve closed the cigarette case with a snap, slipping it underneath the ruined floorboards to bury it in the dirt below. 

_Live a good life or with God as my witness, I’ll punch you out right at heaven’s pearly gates._

“I’ll try,” Steve said, falling quiet for a moment as if he was waiting for a response from Bucky before he finally gave up and turned on his heel. There would be time to grieve later, Steve told himself as he walked out of the bar. The alcohol that he’d drank was already gone from his system, and he felt more clear-headed than he had since Bucky had fallen.

Steve Rogers could break, but Captain America wouldn’t.

* * * * *

For as long as Bucky could remember, he’d had the same kind of dreams.

He was running. 

His shoes echoed against the pavement as he sprinted through too empty streets and he knew that he had to make it home. There was something at home that was important, so important, that the entirety of the world depended on it. Bucky would run, he’d sprint until his lungs caught fire and each breath was a sharp stab within his chest, but it was never fast enough. 

There was a darkness chasing him, one which he could never outrun and which slowly swallowed him home. That was bad enough, but Bucky knew that it was eating away at other people too, the people he cared about. For years, his dreams had been filled with specters, mere ghosts of people he couldn’t put faces to. Bucky hadn’t ever been able to remember the people who were dying. He just knew that it was bad that they were. 

Since he’d met him on the bridge, Steve played a prominent part in Bucky’s dreams, and they’d grown darker. There were dreams where Steve killed him, looking down at him with blank, glazed-over eyes. There was none of the softness that Bucky had come to expect, the recognition that had been present ever since Bucky had lost his mask. Bucky struggled in these dreams, clawing at Steve and crying out when Steve reached out and snapped his arm like it was nothing. 

_Let it go._

Bucky could hear the words in his mind, but Steve never said anything in his dreams. Whether Steve killed him or Bucky killed Steve, not a word was spoken between them. Bucky would wake in a cold sweat, clutching at his right arm as he waited for his breathing to calm. Eventually it would. Eventually he would find a book or walk around until the morning came, and everything would be better again. 

Their second night at the beach house, Bucky dreamed. There was a smile in his heart even if it didn’t show on his face as he ran. There was a knife in his hand, and Bucky held it tightly between metal fingers before he finally caught a glimpse of Steve in the dream. He wore the same tan pants and blue jacket that he’d worn the first time he’d recognized Bucky, and he turned, saw Bucky’s face, and stopped trying to run.

It took less than two seconds for Bucky to close the distance between them, and he lashed out with the knife. Steve blocked the jab, but wasn’t ready for the follow up punch, and when he was knocked back Bucky felt that same surge of adrenaline that he’d had that day. This, he thought as he moved forward, this was the only feeling worth living for. 

Steve was trying to say something, but there was no sound. There was no anything, not even the sound of metal against metal as Bucky knocked away the shield to grab Steve by the throat. All it would take was for him to twitch his fingers and it would be over, quick and easy, but Bucky didn’t want that. He moved again, too quick to see and this time, Bucky could hear it as Steve cried out. 

The Captain groaned as Bucky dropped him, looked down at the hilt of the knife that was sticking out of his chest. Lung. It was probably in the lung, Bucky thought to himself and smiled as he crouched down beside the Captain. He reached up, let his fingers curl around the hilt of the knife the way any other person would touch a lover.

Steve tried to scream when Bucky pulled the knife out, but the punctured lung wouldn’t allow him to get the air he needed. And Bucky’s inner smile finally showed outwardly as he started to cut into the Captain one slow slice at a time.

Those dreams were always harder to wake up from. Bucky opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling, and went over the dream in his head. Sometimes Steve’s death was quick, other times it was drawn out. 

And in the dream, Bucky always enjoyed it.

Bucky pushed himself up out of bed, slipping into the slacks and t-shirt that had been left by his bed. Steve was up already. He could hear the other man moving in the kitchen, and for one long moment, Bucky thought of just leaving through the window. Sucking in a breath, Bucky steeled himself and opened the door. Steve was pouring himself a cup of coffee, nodding at Bucky as the other walked into the room. Bucky half expected to see Steve covered in blood and struggling for breath, but he didn’t say anything.

Instead he moved to where Steve had left the cigarettes the night before and stuck one in his mouth, lighting it with clumsy fingers. It wasn’t using a lighter that was strange to him, Bucky knew how to do that, but there was something humanizing about being able to smoke. The Winter Soldier had never been allowed to do that, no more than he’d been allowed to eat something that he hadn’t been fed, or to take something of his own volition. 

“Terrible habit,” Steve muttered under his breath, but he was smiling as he pushed a fresh cup of coffee across the counter to where Bucky was standing. “Should’ve figured that you’d pick that back up.”

Bucky raised his head to look at Steve blankly and Steve gave him a small smile.

“Back in the war, you smoked like a chimney. Everyone did back then, I was one of the few guys who just couldn’t get a taste for it.”

Oh, Bucky thought as he looked down at the cigarette that he held in his right hand, tapping the ash into a bowl that Steve had set out for him. He tried to cast his mind back, to picture being out in the fields of Europe, searching for crumpled cigarette packages in his rucksack. He could picture it easily, but the soldier in the image was never him. Dernier sometimes or Dugan, but never Bucky himself. 

“We’ll have to find stuff to keep ourselves busy while we’re here,” Steve was saying and Bucky just let him talk. Steve talked a lot, but Bucky didn’t know if it had always been that way or if he was making up for how little Bucky liked to talk these days. “I’ll get us some books or something, maybe a tablet.”

Cigarettes tasted like fire, like a burned out old building where people had died, and Bucky could feel the hot air scorching its way down his throat as he inhaled. For some reason, he liked the feeling. 

“You look like you didn’t sleep well.” Steve’s voice brought Bucky back into the present and he blinked a couple times as he looked at the Captain. “Did you have a nightmare?”

Steve had nightmares sometimes. Bucky could hear him shifting late into the night, but he doubted that the nightmares were quite the same as the ones that Bucky had. Did he hunt Steve in Steve’s dreams too? 

Steve poured himself another cup of coffee, frowning at Bucky’s continued silence and Bucky just watched him, not knowing what to say or what he could trust. His former life had been a lie, he knew that much, but that didn’t mean that this life was real. It felt like something that they would give to him, a test. A new handler to break him in and train him in a new way. 

Bucky looked down at the coffee, not picking it up until the cigarette had long since burned itself out. “You can drink, you know. It’s okay.” Steve was saying and Bucky brought the mug to his lips before he set it back down untouched. “Or I can get you something else.”

The world was taking on a different tone. It felt sharp and jagged in a way that it hadn’t before and Bucky took a step back from the counter. His eyes narrowed as he looked up at Steve. There was nothing but concern on the other man’s face, but that only made the situation seem more suspicious than before. No one gave away anything for free. Not ever. 

No one took care of him like this without training him at the same time. 

“How do I know what you want?” Bucky asked and Steve’s expression became soft. Sad. 

“I just want to help you,” Steve said and Bucky shook his head, fingers groping for a weapon that wasn’t there before he forced himself to stand still. 

That’s not how the world worked. 

Years ago, in the few hazy memories that Bucky could remember from the Red Room, Steve had been there with him. They’d laughed together and Steve had held him when the training had been too much, when Bucky had wept from the way that his body hurt.

But the books that Bucky had read since then and the exhibit in the museum… while Bucky was in the Red Room, Steve was sleeping under the ice.

Steve had never been there.

He probably wasn’t here now.

Steve said something, but Bucky couldn’t hear it over the ringing in his ears and he stumbled back into the room, the defensible little room, to sit down on the bed. His head was throbbing, the world spinning drunkenly around him, and Bucky wished - like he so often did these days - that someone would just put him on ice so he wouldn’t have to think any longer.

* * * * *

I was twelve. Pretty sure it was twelve, but it’s a bit blurry now. It had been a bad winter. Winters were always bad, but even I had a rattle in my chest. Never mind Rogers. Steve was… there was more than one night I was sure that he’d just die. That he’d close his eyes and never wake up.

_> Did that frighten you?_

>’Course it frightened me. There was that rasp when he breathed and I hated it. I fucking hated that sound, but I never wanted it to stop. ‘Cause if it did, if I didn’t hear it then that meant Steve wouldn’t be breathing any more. 

I slept beside him. I didn’t want to leave. Even argued with his mom about leaving. 

_> And then what happened?_

>His mom, Sarah, she pulled me aside. Asked me if I liked boys. I wanted to say no. I know what happens to people who don’t fit in and there wasn’t no one back then who would have stood up for deviants. 

_> So you told the truth?_

>Sarah was hard to lie to. Just as hard as Steve was. It’s the damn eyes, you look at them and you know that you’re just gonna tell ‘em everything because if you try to lie they’ll see right through it. So I told her I thought I did. I was scared. Voice cracked. 

And she told me that I couldn’t be that way. They’d take me away. Hurt me. That there was a reason that men didn’t marry men and she hugged me. She was crying more than I was.

She said she wished the world wasn’t like this. That I wouldn’t be put in jail and told me that when I grew up, I should do the right thing. 

_> And did you do the right thing?_

>Obviously not.

_> You remember a lot of details about that time—_

>No. I don’t remember anything. 

Steve told me a story. I embellished it and told you one. 

_> So you don’t have any strong feelings or memories tied to what you just told me. _

>Not at all. 

_> Would you want to?_

>I don’t know.

_> Why is that, you think?_

>I don’t know.

_> How do you feel about Captain Rogers now?_

>I don’t know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to work and to vacations, this fic will be updated biweekly from now on.
> 
> Fic title taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> Chapter title and lyrics taken from [Way Down We Go By Kaleo](https://youtu.be/9WIU5NN1Q0g?t=1m13s)


	6. State of Grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Steve had long since stopped calling out Bucky’s name when he jerked awake, the cry caught in his throat, as his pulse tried to leap right out of his neck. The television had powered itself down, and the sun had set, leaving the room in near darkness. There was the glint of metal to Steve’s right, and he looked over to see Bucky sitting there, watching him with eyes that almost glowed in the dim light." 
> 
> What once was, what could have been, and all the things that have not yet come to pass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me. 
> 
> (Updated Bi-Weekly)

_I had hope for healing  
I was told that it would come  
If it's me resisting  
Then I need to be undone_

More often than not, Steve was the one who did most of the talking. He had never been the type who words came easily to. Bucky had been the one out of the two of them who’d been able to make small talk and to draw the other person into a conversation. Steve had read about what they had done to Bucky to turn him into the Winter Soldier, enough to make his blood boil and the world to take on a reddish tinge before he’d set the file aside. Still, it was hard not to fall into old habits when he was around him. 

There were things that he wanted to say, things that he wanted to do, but Steve had to hold himself back. Holding himself back had become second nature in a lot of ways. The war had taken its toll on him, but waking up had taken more. Steve knew it, he knew that he wasn’t the same person that Bucky had known any more than Bucky was the same person he had known, but still a part of him wished that they could just go back. It should have been so easy, right? Just let everything go and become who they’d been before. 

Sam had brought a friend, a psychiatrist who was sweet on him and who made Sam grin wide whenever she was brought up in conversation. Steve had been resistant to the idea at first. The more people who knew about Bucky, the more dangerous it was to keep him in one place, but Sam had argued against that. 

“Barnes needs help and you’re not going to be able to do everything for him.”

“I can,” Steve had said, setting his jaw, but Sam had let out a low chuckle and shook his head, leaning against the counter top. Bucky was in the other room. He often locked himself away when Sam came to visit and would have done the same with the Doctor, Susan Smith. Steve stayed in the room with them when Doctor Smith visited, noise-cancelling ear plugs fixed firmly in place. There were times when Bucky became visibly agitated and Steve would sit up straighter, preparing himself to lunge in between the two of them if it became necessary, but Bucky always managed to settle himself down.

Once he’d thrown things, smashing glass on the floor, and the next time Susan had come, she’d brought with her a box of glasses bought cheaply from a store nearby. “If it gets to be too much,” she’d said, “you can grab one of these and break it.”

There was always glass to clean up after she came to visit, but Steve never complained about it.

Because Sam had been right. As exhausting as being Captain America around other people could be, it was worse having to put on that mask around Bucky. There were times when it slipped and Steve let it without even noticing that he was doing so. There were times when Bucky would smile and Steve would grin back, reaching out to touch Bucky’s shoulder. It was only when Bucky pulled away that Steve would remember the years that lay between them and the pain that had forged Bucky into a weapon for the enemy. 

Bucky was lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling blankly when Steve came into his room. He didn’t turn to look at Steve, but from the way that his body tensed, Steve knew that Bucky wasn’t asleep. “You’ve got a terrible poker face,” he murmured and sat down with his back resting against the bed, holding the box lightly in his lap. 

Bucky shrugged, not bothering to speak or to look at Steve still, and Steve followed Bucky’s gaze up toward the ceiling as if that would tell him what Bucky was thinking. 

“Sam picked us up some stuff,” Steve said finally, waiting a couple minutes to see if Bucky wanted to speak before he broke the silence between them. “Do you want to see it?” 

Bucky was so still, and Steve waited again to see if he would get a response. A lot of what he did these days was just waiting to see what reaction that Bucky would give him and applying that as best he could to his own actions. Steve had never tiptoed so carefully around anything or anyone in his life before. As Bucky had liked to joke, Steve was the kind of guy who would rush headfirst into situations and figure things out as he went, but doing that with Bucky… Susan had already cautioned him about it.

“There’s something worrisome about the way he shifts,” she said, looking through her case notes. Susan was always very careful in what she told to Steve and what she withheld, doing her best to respect Bucky’s privacy while giving Steve the tools that he needed to help Bucky.

Or at the very least, the tools to not do more damage. 

“Obviously, he has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but we were expecting that.” Susan pursed her lips, tapping at a list of symptoms on a piece of paper. “The worrisome thing about Sergeant Barnes, to me at least, is that he doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of his core.”

“His core?”

“All of us, even if we can’t remember who we are, have some core aspects which we know to be true of ourselves. Maybe we value honesty or maybe we’re day dreamers. We might not consciously think about it, but when pressed we can think of some core things which make up who we are as a person or that are important to us as people.”

“And Bucky doesn’t have that?”

“When I try to talk to him about things that should be core to him, he talks about other things.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t go into much detail,” Susan said as she pulled the paper back toward her, looking down at it for another long moment. “I’m sure you understand, but often, he talks about you.”

“So I’m his core?”

“No…” Susan shook her head, taking a moment to choose her words. Steve recognized that look and imagined that he wore it more often than not. “But he’s trying to use you as one.”

Steve shook his head, not understanding how that could be a bad thing, and as Susan packed up her files, he cast a long glance toward the bedroom where Bucky had closed himself away the instant the session was over. 

“People need to be able to stand on their own, to make their own decisions, and to live their lives. Connections are a good thing; I’m not saying that they should be avoided, but if you were to be Sergeant Barnes’ core, then it would be almost impossible to figure out where he stopped and where you began.” Susan’s voice was soft, and she followed Steve’s gaze toward the closed door of Bucky’s bedroom before turning to face Steve again. “It becomes harder to pick apart the motivations for what he does. Is he doing this because he wants to or because he thinks that’s what you want?”

Steve didn’t know what to say, and Susan, ever tactful, had said her goodbyes to Steve before taking her leave. 

Bucky had probably been lying on the floor since after his session. He tended to sequester himself after Susan visited when he could. Steve nudged him lightly with his foot and when Bucky didn’t react in any way, he dug into the box and pulled out one of the books that Sam had borrowed from a local library under an assumed name and started to flip through the pages. It was a book about a group of women who flew planes in the war. The Night Witches, as they had been called, were essential to the Russian war effort, but Steve had never heard of them before he picked the book up. 

“This book…” Steve began, looking down at the book instead of at Bucky. “It’s about Russian women who were recruited to fly planes and terrify the German soldiers.” He was torn between a smile and a frown when Bucky moved. Bucky had only shifted when Russia was mentioned, but it was enough to have him pushing himself up into a sitting position so Steve could finally look him in the eye. 

“They let women fly?” He asked, his voice soft and the expression on his face made it clear that he’d never heard of such a thing before. 

“Apparently,” Steve said and handed over the book for Bucky to examine. “See for yourself.”

The box that Sam had brought or ‘the box of wonder’ as he had dubbed it, had actually been two boxes. The first had just been food for the two of them, but the second had more interesting things in it. More than just books, there was also movies, music, and even scented candles. Steve had raised an eyebrow when he saw the candles, his eyebrow rising further when he saw the bag of Lavender scented Epsom salts. 

“Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it,” Sam had grinned and Steve had smiled right back.

“I’ll leave the box here,” Steve said, the questions that he really wanted to ask shrivelling up and dying on his tongue. “I’m going to try taking a bath with these things.” He held up the bag of Epsom salts, the amusement clear in his voice.

How are you feeling? He wanted to ask. Do you remember anything?

But at the back of his mind was Susan’s voice, reminding him that Bucky was more susceptible to suggestions from Steve since he was treating Steve as his core. It was akin to Natasha reminding Steve that he had to be careful with orders since Bucky probably thought that Steve was his new handler. It made sense when it was all put together. For years, handlers had been the people that Bucky had been anchored to, but Steve didn’t want that for him; for either of them. 

He bit back the questions, shaking his head.

“Let me know if you need anything else,” Steve said as he walked out the door, unsurprised when Bucky didn’t answer.

* * * * *

The newspapers could trumpet all they wanted about heroes and unparalleled victories for the Allied troops, but Bucky had only had to step onto European soil to know that no one came back from the war unscathed. Everyone arrived the same way, he was told. Nervous about what they had to do, but with an eagerness undercutting it that the army had to try and temper. It wasn’t that they didn’t want their soldiers to do their duty, that much went without saying, but when soldiers tried to be heroes was when they died. The Americans who had seen action had a different feeling to them, worn down and rough around the edges. They talked about death with a detachment that Bucky had envied at first. 

He’d learned to do that for himself after the first couple battles, to talk about death like it meant nothing, like it was a joke. If his throat felt tight when he talked about the friends in his regiment that had been taken down, if there were tears burning the backs of his eyes, he swallowed them down. The war would take more than just the lives of friends in a soldier who allowed his mind to get clouded. These were people that they were fighting, living and breathing people, but Bucky trained himself to see them as things. They had no more life in them than a tank or a truck. 

Guilt and regrets were all things for the end of the war, he’d thought to himself, only half believing that he would ever make it out of this hell hole. 

Still, even knowing that there was no one to make it through the war without the invisible scars that you carried on your soul, people still seemed to think that Steve would be the one to pull it off. Bucky had watched people talk to Steve. Steve would smile, pat people on the shoulder and reassure them while Bucky rolled his cigarette between his fingers before lighting it up. That was the true meaning behind Captain America, wasn’t it? 

It was the reason that they had to keep letting people film them for the newsreels, stopping to get some time in with a camera crew before they set out on their next missions. Even if they won the war, everyone who took part in it would lose, and by doing this, maybe they were trying to hedge their bets. Look at Steve Rogers. Look at Captain America. He isn’t bowing under the pressure from Hitler, so neither should you. Be a hero like Captain America. 

Coming back to London should have been relaxing, it should have been a place to rest without worrying about getting snuck up on by a bunch of Kraut soldiers, but the higher ups seemed to think otherwise. 

Bucky’s lips quirked into a scowl, and he turned his head to spit onto the dusty ground. “They’re gonna run you into the ground, Stevie.” He said once Steve was done with his meet and greet, pulling himself away from his admiring followers to sneak over to where Bucky was sitting. Bucky wasn’t sure which commando had come up with the idea of climbing to the tops of the buildings in cities to get a break. It was probably Dernier, that sneaky son of a bitch, but it had become a habit whenever they stopped in a place that had buildings they could scale and where they didn’t think they would cause a huge fuss by scaling them. 

Bucky had wanted to climb up a church at first before Steve had nixed that idea. In the end, they had found an abandoned house to sit on top of. The Blitz had hit this neighbourhood hard, and the streets were deserted, but it still felt good to sit up above everything. This was years old, these war wounds, but they still hadn’t rebuilt the city up like it had been. Still, sitting up above everything was relaxing. If Bucky closed his eyes, it was a bit like being back home. 

Steve had hauled himself up with minimal effort and Bucky had grinned, threatening to kick him back off the building if he didn’t stop being so damn perfect. “People here are friendly,” Steve commented mildly, reaching up to run a hand through his hair. There was a reputation to maintain, and as much as the commandos would tease him for it, Steve insisted that they keep themselves looking as if they’d just stepped off the streets of London instead of a battlefield. 

Bucky reached over, batting Steve’s hand away so he could fix the other’s hair for him. “That’s one word for ‘em,” he said, finally settling down on the top of the roof. There was a slight slope to the roof that should have made him easy to see for anyone who was looking, but the people who were rushing around down below were too busy to look up. 

“What would you call them?” Steve looked over at Bucky, a small grin on his face because he already knew what the answer would be. 

“Annoying.” Bucky crushed out his cigarette and lit up another one. Cigarettes were plentiful here and all of the commandos had stocked up, knowing that they would be out in the field again soon enough. Even Steve had grabbed some packs even though he didn’t smoke. They were good to use for trades when it became necessary, and if the commandos ran out, Steve could hand out the packs to them as well. Steve had smoked asthma cigarettes before he’d been treated with the serum, but he’d never been able to handle the roughness of tobacco. 

“Buck…” Steve began, and Bucky exhaled the smoke in his lungs in a quick rush. 

“No, don’t ‘Buck’ me.” A part of him wanted to laugh, but what was the point? They all knew what the game was here. “They’ve got you out on the field, running yourself ragged and then when we get back to civilization, there’s no rest. There’s strategy meetings and puttin’ on your best smile to talk to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who needs some pep.” 

“That’s part of the job,” Steve began and Bucky cut him off with a withering glance. 

“So when does Captain America go away so Steve Rogers can take care of himself?”

Steve was so quiet that Bucky knew the other didn’t have an answer for him. Just as well. Bucky didn’t have a good answer for why things were the way they were either. He knew all the arguments for doing this and they were smart arguments, they were important. Just to Bucky, they didn’t trump Steve taking care of himself. “The war’s wearing on you, Stevie. Don’t think I can’t see it.”

Bucky thought of himself and the drugs that he had tucked away in his bag. He had injected himself before Steve made it up here and the fog in his head felt like it had cleared somewhat. Whatever Zola had done on him, it wasn’t going away like it was supposed to. They were closing in on a year now since Steve had come to find Bucky in that compound, and he was still injecting himself with whatever back-alley drugs that he could find to make the pain stop. It wasn’t a natural pain, that. It was all in his head, his blood burning in his veins, but whenever he was checked out by the camp nurses, they said he was in perfect health. 

His bones would hurt, but getting punched in the face by a Nazi wouldn’t do much more than give him a mild headache. There were a couple hits that should’ve at least broken his jaw, but Bucky had barely blinked. The hits surprised rather than hurt, and he supposed that he should have been thankful for Zola tinkering around with his body, but Bucky couldn’t bring himself to feel grateful for it. 

The war was wearing on all of them, but whereas Bucky knew he was a lost cause… Steve had a real chance of making it through if the higher-ups didn’t suck the life out of him beforehand. 

“I gotta do it, Buck…” Steve began, pulling out his notepad and beginning to jot down a couple words. Bucky eyed him for a moment, waiting to see if it was a letter or a drawing. Drawings, he tended to stick around Steve and shoot the shit with him. When it was a letter though, Bucky preferred to withdraw. He didn’t want to know what Steve was writing to Peggy, although he assumed it was all perfectly above board. He probably told her about his day and the countryside more than anything else. Steve wasn’t the type to pour out his heart onto paper, not with words anyway. 

“Why you?”

Bucky knew that Steve wouldn’t answer the question even before he asked it, but still it hung between the two of them. Steve would never say no to something that he thought might be able to help other people, especially if it was something that seemed as trivial as smiling at people. If the Army needed Steve to be Captain America round the clock, then Steve would do his best to become that person. Bucky knew. That was part of the reason that Bucky had grown so close to Steve in the first place. 

Looking down at Steve’s notepad, it was obvious that Steve was writing a letter rather than sketching anything, and Bucky thought about leaving him alone before deciding against it. Instead, he pulled the pad from Steve’s hands, ignoring the other’s protests as he kept it away. “Shut up. Stop thinking.” Bucky’s lips quirked into a smirk when Steve frowned at him. He was probably trying to think of how he could get his notepad back, but there wasn’t any way, not without Bucky causing a scene and giving away their hiding place.

“You’re impossible,” Steve muttered under his breath, leaning back on his hands to look up at the clouds that lazily made their way across the sky. 

“Look who’s talkin’,” was Bucky’s only reply, and even though he didn’t laugh, Bucky could feel the smile that Steve was trying not to show. “If you’re gonna be Captain America around everyone else, fine. But not me.”

Steve looked at Bucky for a long moment, the amusement in his eyes finally showing on his face. “Punk,” he muttered.

“Ass,” Bucky quipped in return.

* * * * *

Barnes sat near the door, pressing his ear against the solid wood and closing his eyes. There were times when he wondered if his captors were underestimating him, but then he’d stop himself. They weren’t captors, even if Barnes knew they wouldn’t just let him walk away from this haven that the Captain - Steve - had found to keep him. He was dangerous. Barnes looked down at his arm, its metal gleaming in the soft light that filtered through the curtains. He flexed fingers that weren’t his own and yet were his at the same time. 

In the main room, the Captain’s friend was visiting. The flying man. Barnes closed his eyes again and tried to pull the memory from the recesses of his mind. It was like trying to hold onto smoke and finding that the only thing he’d managed to do is stain his hands with ashes. 

Sam. Sam Wilson. The Falcon.

Barnes nodded to himself, knowing that was the correct answer. 

“I think he’s making progress,” the Captain was saying, and even if Sam couldn’t hear the hope in the Captain’s voice, Barnes could almost see the expression on the Captain’s face. That slight lift of eyebrows, the soft expression, the hope that the Captain was holding onto so tightly that it was wrapping around his neck without him realizing it. 

“Maybe,” the bird man responded, his voice pitched low, but Bucky heard it as if Sam was standing in the same room as him. “Just… Don’t make Bucky responsible for your happiness, Steve.” 

“I’m not…” Steve began, but then cut off.

“It’s a heavy burden for anyone to carry and from what I’ve read in the files, he’s got more on his plate than most people.”

Steve sighed, letting out a breath that maybe he hadn’t even known that he was holding. 

Barnes’ chest felt tight and he couldn’t figure out why. The Captain would come in to talk to him sometimes and would just talk, his accent more pronounced when he spoke to Barnes than now, when he was speaking to the Falcon. He would talk to him about anything that was on his mind and at the same time, about nothing at all. It was a ritual that Barnes had grown used to and he watched the Captain grasp at straws.

Pulling away from the door, Barnes opened the window and slipped out onto the front porch. The Captain would worry, but he would trust Barnes to come back. The Captain had more faith in Barnes than he had in himself, and sometimes Barnes felt himself buckling under the weight of unspoken expectations. Maybe that’s what the Falcon had been talking about.

The winter air was crisp, clean. It stung when Barnes took a deep breath and exhaled, watching the plumes of his breath rise up like smoke before disappearing. Barnes pulled a cigarette from his pocket and walked out toward the water, not lighting it yet. There was nothing physically keeping him here. They had talked about leaving the tracker inside of his body, and Barnes had even gone along with the suggestion, but the Captain wouldn’t hear of it.

“We’re going to do this the right way.” He said, his voice brooking no argument. As if he knew what the right way was.

Barnes had thought so at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. The longer he stayed around the Captain, the more cracks that appeared on the outside. It was the little things that gave Steve away.

He wondered if that had always been the case with Steve.

The sand crunched underneath Barnes’ feet, the frost making it feel brittle. It wasn’t snow, but it was the closest that they would be getting for now, and ignoring the cold and the damp, Barnes sat down on the beach. The cold was nothing to him. It had never been anything to Barnes, and he lit his cigarette, taking a long drag of it. 

He knew that he wouldn’t have to wait long until the Captain appeared beside him. Barnes listened for the sound of footsteps, and when he heard them, he wasn’t sure if he was pleased or disappointed. 

“They didn’t let me smoke,” Barnes said before the Captain could get a greeting in or ask one of those too-quiet questions. Neither of them had to ask who they were. Both of them knew. “Thought it might ruin the test results.”

“Because of the chemicals?” 

“Because of the action.”

The Captain fell quiet then, trying to piece it together in his mind, and Barnes left him to it. He had watched the people around him smoke, especially when it had been the seventies, but they’d never offered him a cigarette, and Barnes had never asked for one. There were certain things that weren’t done, and now, even bringing the cigarette to his lips felt like a victory. 

“You know you can do whatever you want now, right?”

“What if I want to leave?” Barnes didn’t look over at the Captain, he didn’t need to. The Captain shifted and then sat down beside Barnes, looking out at the waves. “What if I wanted to leave right now?”

“You’re not finished your treatment…” The Captain began and then fell silent. “When you’re finished, I won’t stand in your way if you want to go.”

Barnes flicked the stub of his cigarette out toward the water and lit another one. He sat cross-legged on the sand and leaned back as he smoked. “When does treatment end?”

The Captain was much more quiet now than he had been other times. It was as if he didn’t understand what to say now that Barnes was contributing to the conversation again. “When you feel better.”

“When I’m your friend again?”

“No.” The word came quickly, fast enough to have Barnes turning his head to look at the Captain. “I mean, I… wouldn’t be against having you back, Buck. I miss the way things were, but…”

“Your friend died in the war.”

Steve closed his eyes, letting out a slow breath, and when he opened them again, he refused to look at Barnes. “Yeah.”

“You died in the war too.”

Barnes had read about it, the way that the Captain had gone under the ice, and even if the books had changed the death into a sleep, Barnes knew better. They had put him to sleep, Hydra had called it cryo-sleep, and had put him under when they didn’t have a use for him. It had been death though, even if Barnes hadn’t been able to put a word to it. Sleep wasn’t supposed to be so painful, it wasn’t meant to put someone away without any idea of whether or not they were going to wake up again. 

“Yeah,” Steve said and he let out a slow chuckle, still not looking at Barnes. “I guess, I did.”

They lapsed into silence and for once, Steve had nothing to say. Barnes watched as the Captain was brought back to the forefront, his expression smoothing over. He wondered where Steve went when the Captain took over. Was it the same as him? 

“You don’t have separate personalities,” Susan had said during their last session, looking at Barnes from over her notes. “They’re all parts of the same person, all parts of you.”

Barnes had nodded, saying nothing else. “Do they feel separate?” Susan had asked, and he’d had no answer for her. 

Just like he didn’t have an answer for the Captain now, for all those questions that the Captain wasn’t allowing himself to ask. 

“Talk,” Barnes said, not knowing how to say it without demanding. 

The Captain was quiet, and then he shook his head, pushing himself to his feet. “Let’s watch a movie instead,” his voice was quiet, hushed, as he offered a hand to pull Barnes to his feet. 

“Which movie?”

“Sam brought us the Wizard of Oz. Do you remember that?”

Barnes paused before falling into step behind the Captain as he walked. There was a flash of color in his mind, but he couldn’t place the movie. “Should I?”

“We watched it before. It was a big deal back in the day.” The Captain shrugged his shoulders, some of Steve’s Brooklyn accent seeping in. “Still is from what I’ve heard. It’s a classic.” He chuckled at that words, shaking his head. 

Classic: a kind word for old. 

Barnes followed the Captain into the living room, both of them shaking off the cold while the Captain got everything set up. Barnes sat on the couch, as far to one side as he could, and it wasn’t until the Captain raised an eyebrow at him that the small wall of pillows that Barnes had been making felt silly. He froze, his mind running through scenarios for this. He could just leave. The Captain wouldn’t stop him from doing so, but instead of saying anything else, Steve smiled.

Barnes watched as Steve bent down to pick up one of the pillows that had fallen to the floor and placed it against the others to help fortify the wall. The wall was small, not even reaching Barnes’ shoulder, but he liked having it there. “Do you want me to get more pillows?” Steve asked, and after a moment’s thought, Barnes shook his head.

Steve reached for one more and handed it over. Barnes hugged it to his chest and pretended not to see Steve’s grin.

* * * * *

There was probably a part of him that knew that this was a dream. The strains of the Wizard of Oz had long since faded and they had started another movie, a period piece that had been shot recently. Steve didn’t know anything about Anna Karenina, but the Russian backdrop had appealed to Bucky, and he had relented. They had talked about the casting with Bucky making a face at the British accent that the actors used for the movie. 

“No, no. That’s not right,” Steve heard him muttering to himself, making Steve smile as he mimicked some of the lines in a much more convincing Russian accent. Somewhere in between the beginning of Anna Karenina’s affair with Count Vronsky and her husband growing wise to the lovers, Steve drifted off. Bucky had given up one of his pillows from his wall, and Steve’s eyes had grown heavy as he held the pillow loosely by his side. 

When Steve opened his eyes again, he was somewhere else. Gone was the fanciful stagecraft of the movie and Bucky sitting stock still beside him. Gone was the quiet warmth of the cottage and the dimming light of the sun.

Instead, Steve stood in a crowded dance hall. 

“This is a dream,” he whispered to himself, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. “I’ve had this dream before.”

A witch had put the thought into his head, Steve told himself, but as soon as he thought that, his mind rejected it. 

Witches don’t exist.

Neither do super soldiers, Steve wanted to say, but as he took his first steps forward, the awareness faded to a vague unease that Steve couldn’t put his finger on. Everyone was laughing and having a good time, but there was something missing. Someone missing. Steve looked around the hall for a familiar face. One of the Commandos perhaps. Bucky was sure to be here somewhere, probably charming a group of girls with a rakish grin.

Steve flinched at the flashbulb of the camera, wincing at the soldier who had spilled wine on his shirt and was being cleaned up in front of him. He had seen men die like that and each flash of the camera, each small explosion reminded him of the bombs being dropped. He flinched again, moving toward the center of the hall. Everyone was laughing, but he couldn’t find it in himself to do the same. 

I’ll just find Bucky and tell him that I gotta go, Steve thought. Bucky would understand and would probably end up coming with him no matter how much Steve told him he should stay. It was comforting to know that whatever happened, Bucky would be by his side, and just by thinking it, Steve felt some of the tension ease out of his shoulders. There was a glimpse of dark hair across the room, a familiar walk that had Steve easing his way through the people in the crowd. They parted before him like water, moving out of his way without him needing to ask, and Steve kept moving, needing to find Bucky so he could leave.

“Are you ready for our dance?” Peggy’s voice reached Steve’s ears before she was able to touch his shoulder, and he turned, jaw slack as if he were seeing her for the first time in years. He didn’t have any words for her at first, struck dumb by the fact that she was here and looked so perfect in that blue dress.

“I… Peggy…” Steve’s brow creased and he almost reached for her before thinking better of it. He wanted to pull her into a crushing hug, one that would just reaffirm that she was here, that she was real. Steve didn’t know why he was having so much trouble believing it. “Why does it feel like it’s been so long?”

“It’s been months,” Peggy spoke in those crisp tones, somehow firm and reassuring all in one. “The end of the fighting… things became quite hairy there for a few moments. I was worried about you.”

Steve swallowed hard and looked away from her. “Peg…” Every word felt hard for him to push past his lips. “Have you seen…?”

“I haven’t seen James, if that’s what you’re about to ask.” Peggy’s lips curved into a small, secretive smile that Steve couldn’t pick apart. “I imagine that he’s found some women who will keep his attention.”

“I just feel… like something is wrong.” Steve managed to get out, looking back out over the dance floor. He could hear the laughter, so loud in his ears that he thought they might bleed. “I need to find him.”

Then the sound was gone, sucked away or barricaded behind an invisible wall, and Peggy’s hand was on his arm, stopping Steve from moving away. “The war’s over, Steve.” She said, her tone so warm that it made his heart pound.

It was never over. 

“We can go home…” She whispered, her smile falling away when she saw the torn expression on his face. “Imagine it.”

He had been. 

Steve wanted to scream the words, but knew that he couldn’t find the breath, and he turned away from Peggy to find that all the sound was gone. The dance hall had emptied, the music was gone. Steve was alone, standing in the middle of the dance floor. The silence grew so loud that it was deafening, and Steve couldn’t even hear his own ragged breathing as he looked around, searching for some clue that he could bring it back.

It didn’t matter if it wasn’t real. Steve wanted his world back. 

He blinked, and then Peggy was in his arms, turning her head ever so slightly so that he couldn’t steal a kiss. “Later,” she murmured in his ear, laughing softly when he argued that he wanted one now. “I want to dance.”

Everything was so soft and so quiet, the world fading away until there was only Peggy in Steve’s arms. The war was over like she said, and Steve had no reason to fight any more, no reason to carry the shield. 

We can go home, Peggy had said. 

We could be happy, Steve heard.

“Will you stay with James after the war?” she asked, and Steve, for some reason, never faltered in his smile.

“Bucky’s always been a part of my life. I don’t know why that’d change now.”

It occurred to him belatedly that maybe Peggy wouldn’t like that, that she wouldn’t want to have to share him, but she simply pushed herself onto her toes. “Good,” she murmured, pressing her lips to the corner of Steve’s mouth. “Come find me later and we’ll go home. All of us.”

“And be happy?” Steve grinned at her, even as she pulled away. 

“We’re clever people, Steve.” Peggy matched his grin as she pulled away. “We’ll figure it out.”

Steve blinked, and the dance floor was empty again. He turned his head to look at the decorations that were crumbling to dust before his very eyes, decaying. “You look lost, pal.”

Blink again and the party was in full swing. Bucky stood there in front of Steve with a crooked grin. “Didya find a way to get drunk?” He let out a laugh, leaning in to nudge Steve with his shoulder when Steve shook his head. 

Peggy was right there, still moving over to the bar to get herself a drink, and Bucky followed his gaze. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, you know that?” 

“Yeah,” Steve let out a half-laugh, not sure what he’d been so worried about. “You wanna dance, Buck?”

“You’re just gonna break my toes,” Bucky said, but he grabbed Steve’s hand and pulled him back out onto the floor. With anyone else there might have been some friction as to who was leading, but Bucky fell into step with Steve, letting the other take the reins. “I heard you were looking for me.”

“I heard you’d found some pretty ladies to keep you busy.” Steve countered, and Bucky’s grin turned downright devious. 

“Well, you know how it is. Can’t fault a guy for looking at the menu so long as he comes back to eat.” 

Bucky’s hand was warm against his own, his body pressed flush against Steve and Steve nudged his nose against Bucky’s cheek. “I missed you.” 

“Missed me? Stevie, it’s been like an hour.”

“Feels longer.” Steve lifted his head to see that the dance floor was clearing out.

Blink.

The man who stood in front of him, who aimed a gun at him, was not the Bucky that Steve knew. There was no warmth or recognition in his eyes as he looked down at Steve, just contempt that had the man’s lips contorting into a sneer. His finger moving to turn off the safety. 

Blink.

Steve dipped Bucky down, grinning at the whoop that his friend let out and then Bucky was laughing. “And you said I was the one going soft,” Bucky said, going still the moment that Steve’s lips brushed his. Then Bucky was pressing forward, deepening the kiss with an urgency that made it feel like they were running out of time. “Bucky…”

Blink. 

The Winter Soldier’s hand moved, the gun that had been aimed at Steve’s heart pressing against his own temple. “Don’t,” Steve tried to say and the Winter Soldier just fixed him with a glare as his finger tightened on the trigger.

Blink.

“We were already dead, Stevie.” Bucky’s voice cracked as he held onto Steve as tight as he could. “We just didn’t know it then. We just didn’t…” 

The world exploded into the sound of a single shot, and Bucky slumped against Steve, blood staining their uniforms. Gone was the music, gone was Peggy, and Steve let Bucky’s weight bring him down to his knees, fumbling to get a better grip on him.

Bucky stiffened his arms and all around him, Steve could hear the bombs beginning to fall again. The world shook with every hit.

* * * * *

Steve had long since stopped calling out Bucky’s name when he jerked awake, the cry caught in his throat, as his pulse tried to leap right out of his neck. The television had powered itself down, and the sun had set, leaving the room in near darkness. There was the glint of metal to Steve’s right, and he looked over to see Bucky sitting there, watching him with eyes that almost glowed in the dim light. 

Steve waited for Bucky to reach for him, to laugh and call his name, to tell him it was just a dream.

Stevie, you idiot. I’m right here.

But Bucky didn’t move. He watched Steve from behind his little wall of pillows, and it all came back so quickly that Steve had to rub his face with his hands to stop himself from reaching for Bucky. 

“Dream?” Bucky asked, his voice so quiet that even Steve strained to hear it, and after a moment, Steve nodded his head.

“Yeah, Buck. Just a bad dream.”

“Barnes.”

“Sorry. Barnes. I’ve been bad about calling you that, haven’t I?”

Steve shook his head, trying to clear it, and Bucky didn’t say anything else, just offered Steve a pillow to replace the one that had fallen to the floor. “How long was I out?”

“Two hours.” 

“And you just sat here?”

Bucky shrugged and then nodded his head. “There wasn’t anything else to do.” There was a soft flick of Bucky’s lighter, and the glow of his cigarette gave Steve something to focus on. “You were smiling for a bit.”

“Was I?”

Bucky nodded his head and after a moment, offered the cigarette to Steve to take a drag. Steve took it from him and had a small drag before handing it back. “Those still taste awful,” he said, making a face. 

Again, Bucky shrugged. 

“I… Don’t worry, okay?” Steve wasn’t even sure if Bucky was worried about him and the dream that he’d had, but Steve wanted to make sure they started this out properly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had this dream.”

Bucky tilted his head to one side, not asking, but Steve knew that he was still listening. “There was this girl. She’s an Avenger now actually, Wanda. She has these powers that allow her to get inside people’s heads.” Steve shrugged his shoulders, mimicking the movement that Bucky had made before as he tried to make it seem like this was nothing. “And she got into mine once. I’ve been having the same dream ever since.”

“What happened in the dream?”

“You died,” Steve began and Bucky just watched him, obviously not content with that answer. “I dream about that a lot.”

“Did I scream?”

“In the dream or real life?” Steve frowned when Bucky fell silent again and let out a sigh. “You screamed as you fell when you died in the war. In my head… sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.”

“Oh,” was all Bucky would say, and he pushed himself to his feet, moving across the room to grab a fresh ash tray for himself and staying near the kitchen. Steve thought that maybe he would come back, but he seemed content to stay there, and after five minutes or so, Steve pushed himself up so he could go join Bucky in the kitchen. 

“What’s on your mind?” Steve asked, and Bucky shook his head, clamming up. “Have it your way.”

It was hard to just let it go. He’d thought, he’d felt that maybe they were making progress, but then it would all slip away from them. Steve went into the bathroom to take a shower and then stopped, coming back out into the kitchen and flipping on the light. The brightness of it made his eyes sting as he looked over at Bucky. 

“Does it bother you? All of this?”

“I don’t understand.” Bucky crushed out his cigarette, for once not lighting another one. 

“You said once… or hinted at, I guess, that you might not want to remember.” Steve was having as much trouble finding the words now as he had been when it came to the dream. It bothered him even though he wasn’t ready to admit it. He wanted Bucky to remember, but what would remembering do for either of them? It wouldn’t bring back the past no matter how much Steve wanted it to.

“I don’t.”

“Should I stop trying?” 

Bucky was quiet for a minute, his brow creasing into a frown. “I don’t know.” 

Steve needed to know, he needed to have a better idea of where he was going and whether it was the right decision. The murkiness of everything in the future was wearing him thin, but at the same time, Steve didn’t know how else to go about things. “I can try to stop.”

“But you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know either, Buck.” Steve gestured at the cabin around him. “I want… if nothing else, I want to know you’re okay. I’d like to have you in my life again. I… missed having you in my life, but everything’s different now and I know that.”

“I won’t be able to be the guy from the museum.”

Steve let out a half laugh, one that had no mirth in it. “Barnes, even I’m not the guy from the museum.” He moved closer, watching Bucky to see if he tensed. “All of that shit is so whitewashed and watered down that I can’t see myself in what they’ve got displayed either.”

“So if you’re not the guy from the museum, then who are you?” 

It struck Steve suddenly that this was the most that Bucky had talked to him since they’d been together in the war. “Just a guy from Brooklyn, trying to… make sense of things.” Steve paused, went quiet for a moment before looking over at Bucky. “What about you?”

“Someone trying to… be someone.”

Bucky’s words were slow, each one chosen carefully, and Steve nodded his head. It was a step. Not a weapon or an asset, not a killer or an assassin. With all that Bucky had been put through, having him accept that he was human was a good start. “Trying to be a person is a good start,” Steve said and he reached out, giving Bucky’s shoulder a light squeeze before he moved away from him. “Good night, Barnes.” 

It wasn’t much, but it was something. The dream still echoed in Steve’s mind as he picked up tape to wrap his knuckles in, but he felt renewed somehow, better despite all the setbacks. Maybe they were still making progress, even if it was slow. 

Steve was outside the house, moving to the tree where they’d tied the punching bag so it wouldn’t make too much noise inside. He’d nearly reached it when Bucky’s words came back to him. 

Maybe he hadn’t meant that he was trying to be a person, his own person.

Maybe he’d meant that he was trying to be Bucky.

Steve wrapped his hands, sucking in a deep breath before he began to hit the bag. Maybe they’d been moving backward instead of forward this entire time.

* * * * *

Barnes sat on his covered desk long after the Captain had left to go hit the punching bag. His back to the wall, facing the window, Barnes listened as the chain holding the bag up rattled. If the Captain kept going at it like that, it could take down the whole damn tree, he thought to himself and then shrugged the thought away. It wasn’t his problem either way.

Dreams of death were slow to go away. Barnes knew it better than most, and yet he still found himself wishing that things were different.

That was new, the wishing. He was still getting used to it. 

Maybe that was all part of trying to be a someone again. 

However much time he spent inside of his room, it never really changed the fact that Barnes wanted to spend time with the Captain. The man made his skin crawl and his head hurt, but in some ways that was better than the silence that Barnes found himself sinking into when the Captain wasn’t around. Susan had warned Barnes about it, had told him to find something that was his very own to hold on to.

But Barnes didn’t know where to start when it came to shit like that. 

It was easy enough to say it, but how the hell was someone supposed to do it? It wasn’t as if he could just skip back through the years and find what had been his before. The man that had been shown in the museum, Sergeant Barnes, he’d been shown as someone who was so noble that it made you want to just cave his stupid face in. A good person, untouched by war and who probably never had a single crisis of conscience during the war or had to stop to think about anything. 

Compare that to a man who’d been turned into a killer, whose entire purpose for living was just to kill and who had been fighting for the wrong side this entire time without knowing it. There was a snapping sound, and Barnes looked down to see that he’d punched his fist through the desk. The Captain wouldn’t be happy about that, but there was nothing that could be done now. 

Barnes slid off the desk, listened for the sound of the chain rattling in the yard. When he still heard it, he opened the window and slipped out onto the porch like he had earlier that day. 

There were no thoughts in his head aside from needing to get away. It wasn’t even a thought really, more of a feeling that pushed at him until there wasn’t room in his mind for anything else. Barnes glanced back at the Captain. From where he was, he could see Steve’s silhouette, and he watched as the Captain poured everything he had into each punch.

Should I stop trying?

Barnes could still hear the words when he turned away from the Captain, from the house, not sure why those words out of all the ones that had been said were the ones that were sticking with him. He started to run, falling into a sprint just to get that extra burst. The cottage was too small, and while the world was big, it felt like it was too small too. 

Barnes didn’t know how to tell the Captain that it felt like one big hamster wheel. No matter how far he ran, he wasn’t gonna get anywhere, and here the Captain was, putting all this time and energy into a failed project. A failed experiment who was only good for disposing of people that weren’t supposed to be around anymore. There was a terrible yawning emptiness that spread itself out before Barnes, and he didn’t know what to do about it. 

Even nightmares, something as simple as nightmares, Barnes hadn’t been able to help with, and for once, he’d wanted to. 

They all had nightmares, it came with being soldiers in the first place, but…

Steve sat up with Barnes when he had nightmares. He seemed to know what to say and what to do so even though they never touched, Barnes felt himself eased. With Steve…

Bucky was lost.

Cursing under his breath, Barnes turned on his heel and headed back to the house. Steve was still beating the bag into a pulp, and for a brief instant, Barnes thought about just leaving him to that and going back in through the window. Just for a moment and then he cursed again, moving out to where the punching bag was. 

“Steve,” he said, pitching his voice to carry.

“I need a minute, Buck. Jus—” Steve couldn’t have looked more surprised if Barnes had clocked him in the jaw. He might have expected that more even, Barnes thought to himself, but he watched as Steve’s hands fell to his sides and he blinked a couple times. 

Barnes watched him for a moment longer, feeling horribly out of place as they stood here. Steve caught the bag to keep it from swinging, taking the few steps needed to stand near Barnes. “Is everything okay?” Steve asked, his breathing still ragged from hitting the bag, and the concern was obvious in his eyes, tempered by the hope that he usually tried so hard to hide. 

“Leave the bag for a bit.” Barnes said finally, his voice cracking a little. It wasn’t often that he talked this much and it was as if his throat was rebelling against the very idea of it. 

“Why?”

“We can watch a movie instead.”

Barnes gave a half smile, his eyes scrunching up around the edges, and he reached out like Steve had earlier. His skin was liable to crawl right off his bones, but Barnes held on to Steve’s shoulder for a moment before he let go. Steve had a soft expression on his face, and he looked at Barnes for a long moment as if searching for hidden motives before he nodded. 

“Yeah, we could do that. Are you…” Steve sucked in a breath, obviously still trying to catch up with what was happening. “Are you okay with that?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, squeezing Steve’s shoulder one more time before he started to lead Steve back inside. “I’m fine with it.”

* * * * *

Dear James, 

You will never read this letter any more than Steve will be able to read the ones I’ve written to him. I don’t do this lightly, I hope you understand. Writing to the dead is a strange business as I’ve been told. Maybe this is my way of letting you go. I held onto you, both of you really, all throughout the war and it took me a long time to learn how to let you go. In some ways, Steve was easier.

He was always there, people were always talking about it, and I got the chance to say goodbye, however layered it was. There was and is no escaping Captain America and the person that they want Steve Rogers to be. Even as I object to the revisionist history, a part of me knew that this would happen from the start. When you give people a good man and a heroic death, they’ll make him into a legend.

And legends, as you might imagine, are wonderful for selling products.

It struck me the other day that I hear very little about you though, James. All this talk about Steve and it’s as if you never existed at all, a footnote to Steve’s legacy. I hate it and I know that Steve would hate it too. He never liked it when people fussed over him and left you or any of the Commandos out. 

I want to think that it wouldn’t bother you, that you would laugh and smile that smile. You know, that one that always makes Steve light up when he sees it. I want to think that you would be happy back in New York with the war over and that you would be able to find your balance again here. 

Our truce is over now, I suppose. With Steve lost somewhere in the Atlantic and you somewhere in the mountains. Lost. Dead. I shouldn’t fool myself or make it more palatable. Both of you are gone now and prettying up the language won’t change a thing. 

I hope that you’re happy, wherever you are. I hope that Steve is by your side and that you’re both still making each other laugh. 

Just know that you’re missed and that even if the rest of the world forgets, I will always remember James Buchanan Barnes. 

Love, 

Peggy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> Chapter title and lyrics taken from [State of Grace by The Kays](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwT3sngWtsY)


	7. Ghost Towns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m not expecting you to just pick up where we left off.”
> 
> “Noted,” Bucky reached for his cigarettes and picked up another one, lighting it before he grabbed the ashtray to move over to the couch. He had started sitting on the floor in front of the couch, leaning back against it. It was more comfortable for him even though Bucky wasn’t quite sure why that was the case. 
> 
> “Do you want me to talk about it?” Steve let out a long sigh as he followed Bucky to the main room to sit on the couch. “I never know what to do, Barnes.” His voice was softer as he admitted that, and Bucky shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know what to do either; neither of them had been trained for this. The world was great at creating soldiers, not turning them back into civilians.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million and a half thanks to Fen without who this fic would never have been written and who has been editing this monster for me. 
> 
> (Updated Bi-Weekly)

_I've seen more places than I can name  
And over time they all start to look the same  
But it ain't that truth we chase  
No, it's the promise of a better place_

The sound of the train, screeching on the rails was what pulled Barnes from a restless sleep. For as long as he could remember, there had always been trains in his mind, which granted, wasn’t all that long, but the echoes of metal on metal had Barnes sitting up straight in bed. His stomach would drop when he heard the sounds in his head even though Barnes couldn’t quite place why. In his mind he could picture a train that had once been sleek and new, top of the line in terms of design. 

He could picture the cold metal interior and the way that his balance on the roof of it had felt perilous as it rushed forward through the tracks. That’s all there was. Little flashes of sensation and feeling, the rumble and sway of the carriage underneath him. The relief that turned all too quickly to dread and then the fear. 

The screech would grow louder in his mind the longer that Barnes stayed on the train, growing in pitch until he felt like his mind would snap in two just from the sound alone. 

It was torture and yet, Barnes found himself willingly going back to that place. 

When he closed his eyes, he found himself back on the train and looking out at the landscape rushing past. The train decayed around him, the shininess of the metal worn away and rusted until Barnes felt like he’d be able to put his hand through the side just by pressing against it. The train creaked and groaned, empty except for Barnes, and he sat on the edge of a section of torn-out wall, watching the world fly down below him. 

The world changed every time Barnes closed his eyes. When he opened them, the train could have whisked him across half the world. Sometimes he was in New York, the skyscrapers brushing past his feet as he looked down at the maze of streets. Other times, it was a flat field with men cowering in the trenches, peeking their heads over the sides before summoning the courage to run forward. 

Once or twice it had been Washington, and Barnes had waited patiently for the scenery to switch again. Even the cold of the winter pass was better than the place where all of this had started. Where the Winter Soldier had laid down his gun and Barnes had begun to shake off the conditioning in the same way that someone would wake from a nightmare. Sharply and all at once, with the echoes of it lingering long in the recesses of his mind. 

Barnes pushed himself out of bed, thinking to grab a cigarette to smoke from the kitchen when he heard the Captain’s voice. 

“Yeah, Peg. It’s me.” Steve sounded strange, like he was being torn in two different directions, and Barnes opened the door just to stand in it, watching the way that Steve was holding himself. His shoulders were slumped as he leaned his elbows against the counter, one hand holding his phone pressed against his ear. “Yeah, I’m alive. They… they found me under the ice.”

Barnes blinked a couple times. He knew that this was a private moment, one that he shouldn’t have been intruding on, and at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to step back into his room to shut the door. His feet felt rooted to the floor. “Yeah. Yeah, somehow I made it through. Bucky did too.” Steve’s voice was soft, but Bucky could still hear it as he watched the Captain struggle with himself. “Don’t cry, Peggy…” There was a rasp to Steve’s words, and it was that which had Bucky moving forward, reaching out before his hand fell uselessly to his side. “We’re fine. We’ll… maybe we’ll be able to come to see you soon or something.”

There had been mention of Peggy Carter in the history books. They’d spoken of her working with Captain America and how Steve had saved the life of the man who would become Peggy’s husband. Bucky had even heard rumors that they’d been together, but there was something about that which just didn’t seem to jibe in his head, even if he didn’t know the reason why. Maybe it was Steve standing in the kitchen like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders and it was crushing him minute by minute.

“Shh, don’t cry. It’ll… it’ll all be okay, I promise.”

Would it though? Bucky waited until Steve had straightened up before he moved forward again, reaching for his smokes and lighting one up.

“Yeah. I’ll see you soon, Peg. Take care of yourself.” 

Steve didn’t turn around when the call was over. He stayed there with his back turned as he straightened his back and stiffened his shoulders. Only then did he turn around, and Bucky saw that his eyes were dry even though they were rimmed with red. “How much did you hear?” Steve put the phone down on the counter, moving to the fridge to pull out something to drink. He didn’t even seem to look twice at what it was he was grabbing and ended up with a carton of orange juice in one hand. 

“Most of it.”

“You should have said something.” Steve poured himself a glass of orange juice and then just stared at it, setting the carton down on the counter and forgetting about it. 

“You’re crying.” 

“What?” Steve’s head snapped up to look at Bucky, and he reached up to touch his cheek. “I’m not crying, Barnes.”

“There are no tears, but…” Bucky shrugged, not knowing how to put it into words as he looked up at Steve. He’d touched him a couple times since that night by the punching bag. All brief, never skin to skin. The thought occurred to him that he could reach out right now and touch Steve’s hand, take it into his and hold it until some of that tension eased out of Steve’s shoulders. Bucky thought about it so hard that his head began to ache, but his hand remained where it was, and Steve didn’t move, just watching him. 

Steve’s expression was strange. All twisted up and then forcefully smoothed out. Bucky didn’t know what to make of it. A movie didn’t seem like the right thing to offer now with Steve looking the way that he did and Bucky’s cigarette burning itself out in between them. Remembering the smoke, Bucky took a quick drag before stubbing the entire thing out. 

“Do you ever think of trains?” Bucky asked after the silence stretched out between them, and Steve tensed further, looking for all the world like he was bracing himself for a blow.

“Once in awhile,” Steve’s words were slow and his eyes were so focused on Bucky that this time, Bucky was the one who looked away. “Have you been thinking about trains, Barnes?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Not when you’re looking like that.” Bucky said, picking up his cigarette pack only to find that it was empty. He crumpled it inside of his fist and tossed it to one side before pushing himself up to look for another one. 

“How do you want me to look?” Steve had frustration lacing his voice. Bucky was getting better at figuring these things out or maybe he’d known somehow all along. It could have been programmed into him, although he didn’t know the reason why they would have done that. 

“Not like you want to fight.” Bucky chose his words carefully, and he watched Steve the way that someone would watch a dog they weren’t sure to trust or not. Steve opened his mouth to argue and then stopped himself, his brows furrowed with a deep-set frown before he nodded.

Bucky took a drag of his cigarette and reached for the orange juice that Steve hadn’t touched to take a sip. He didn’t need to look to know where Steve had gone, and when he heard the water running, Bucky exhaled his smoke slowly up into the air. 

Steve was gonna end up smelling like lavender again.

* * * * *

Even during the war, they were given leave. It was a strange thing to think about that now with the world on the cusp of destruction as it was, soldiers were still allowed to take leave. It was for small periods of time, but Steve, having been chasing down Hydra for as long as he had, knew how valuable those times were. They’d come off of a long string of missions, ones that had even quieted Dum Dum down by the time they were finished. 

It almost didn’t seem to matter anymore whether or not the missions were successful. Everything that the Commandos had were wrung out of them, and the deaths had been hard to swallow. One of the last of their missions had them happening upon a camp that they’d thought had been for prisoners of war, but nearly everyone in there had been a civilian. “They’re undesirables,” one of the German guards had told Gabe, and Steve had looked around the filthy slums, swallowing hard. 

There were men, women, and children here. All of them with numbers on their wrists and a gaunt, emaciated look that tore at his heart. It reminded him of his first mission, the one that he’d never been meant to take. The amount of people was comparable to the number of soldiers from the 107th that had been saved, but these people… they weren’t soldiers. They hadn’t joined the fight, but had been ripped bodily from their homes. 

“What do you mean by undesirables?” Steve had asked and waited with an ill-concealed impatience as Gabe translated both the question and the answer. 

“Jewish people, homosexuals, and Romani,” Gabe said, and Steve could feel his stomach turn as he looked at the people in front of him. “Cap, we’re not gonna be able to keep this many prisoners of war all the way back to behind our line.”

They were behind the German line as it was, fighting alongside trapped Allied soldiers in an attempt to free them before Winter slammed the door on them. The weather was quickly taking a turn for the worse, and they had to move. In a few days, no one knew what the landscape would look like. “We’ve got more than a thousand Allied soldiers in the surrounding areas,” Steve said as Bucky stepped up beside him, Falsworth in tow. “How many prisoners?” 

“Fifty.” Bucky’s voice was flat, and Steve knew that meant bad news. “Most of them injured.”

Steve looked down at the German man in front of him, his jaw clenching. “What did you do to the people here?”

Put them to work came the first answer, but with some prompting from Gabe, there were other things. Steve listened to the stories of rape and beatings, he listened to the experimentation, the starvation, the abuse. “I was just following orders,” the German man said, down on his knees. “We were told it would build a better world.” 

Steve wanted to be sick, but he pulled the man up to his feet. “Take the highest ranking men who are still alive and question them.”

“And the others?” Bucky raised an eyebrow at him. “We just can’t let them go.”

Steve knew that. A part of him nearly snapped at Bucky, but there were people to see and Steve gritted his teeth, swallowing his rage back down. Fifty German soldiers with maybe five of them who would be able to give the Commandos any information. The Commandos were a force to be reckoned with, but sheer numbers alone would overwhelm them if Steve didn’t move quickly. All the Allied soldiers who were in the surrounding areas were too far away to help if things went sour. 

Besides, Steve and the Commandos were here to save the Allies, not the other way around. 

“We can’t just let them go,” Bucky said again and his voice was flat, eyes cold. Despite that, he reached out to touch Steve’s shoulder, bringing Steve out of his reverie. “Not when we got at least a hundred civilians in here too.”

“No,” Steve agreed, his voice soft. “The injured aren’t going to make it through this weather. Not when they’d have to march to meet up with the rest. And the able bodied…” There was a part of him that wanted to wash his hands of it. Send them off with no weapons and no food, let God decide what their fates would be, but Steve couldn’t let that happen. Not when they there was even a chance that they knew about American troop movements.

“We can’t let them go,” Bucky said again and Steve shot him a look that had Bucky swallowing down whatever else he was going to say. 

“Line them up in an area without civilians. They’ll be shot.” 

All of them were quiet. “I’ll do it,” Bucky said finally, and Steve shook his head. 

“No. Get Dum Dum and round up the leaders, start finding out what they know. Falsworth, go with Gabe and Dernier to deal with the wounded soldiers. Any who can stand, bring them to me.” Steve swallowed hard. “Morita, will be with me and shoot anyone who tries to escape.”

There was a pall that hung over the Commandos after that. Everyone knew what they needed to do and it was carried out with an almost ruthless efficiency. Steve watched as the soldiers were brought out and he dispatched them all as quickly as he could. He steeled himself against the pleading. There were mass graves in the back where the bodies had been piled up and coated with lime. The soldiers would go into the same pit that they’d made for the people they were terrorizing. 

In the end, it was quick. The blood was soaking into the snow that had started to fall again. 

The Commandos had been called in to take down a Hydra blockade that had American soldiers trapped behind the German line, and this compound had never been part of the plan. When Gabe had come to Steve, describing to him what he’d seen there was a brief second where Steve had thought about just walking past. This wasn’t part of the orders and didn’t need to become their problem, but even as the thought took shape, Steve knew that he wasn’t going to follow it. 

He couldn’t leave innocent people to die. Steve couldn’t save everyone, but with the element of surprise, this camp was ripe for the taking.

The smell of death hung heavy in the air, and Steve swallowed around the lump in his throat, reloading his gun to dispatch the last remaining Germans. “You,” he said to one of the people who had taken up arms to fight once the Commandos had come in. She was a young woman, probably around the same age that Steve was, but there was a determination in her face that could only have been born through suffering. “We need to go and help our troops. Can you hold this base until we get back?”

“And will you come back?” The woman’s voice was clear as she arched an eyebrow at him. Steve would learn later that her name was Anya and that she’d been living in Poland when the war started. She’d just not left the country fast enough. 

“I’ll come back, I promise.”

Anya’s face was a blank mask, and Steve tried to force his face into a smile, but didn’t quite make it. Instead, he adopted a serious expression as he looked at her. 

“American promises don’t mean much to me,” Anya said, and Steve nodded his head, understanding that. 

“America’s not promising. I am.” 

Anya watched him for a moment longer and then nodded her head. “We will control this place until you return. Make sure that you’re visible or we will shoot you.”

“Even if they’re waving an American flag?”

“America’s not promising,” Anya said, mimicking Steve’s exact tone even as her accent gave a soft lilt to the words. “You are.”

Bucky walked up to stand beside Steve, placing a hand on his shoulder, and Steve looked over at him. The words never left Bucky’s mouth, but Steve could see them written all over his face. “You did good, Stevie.” Bucky squeezed Steve’s shoulder and then let go, shouldering his rifle so they could begin their trek.

“Everyone ready, Sergeant?”

“Commandos are just waiting on their Captain.” Bucky’s grin was lopsided, his eyes remaining cold and mirthless as he gestured toward the base’s entrance. “Can’t say I’ll be sad to see this place in the rear view mirrors.”

Steve didn’t say anything, hefting his shield and hooking it onto his back before he followed Bucky away from the blood-stained snow. He climbed into one of the trucks, Bucky nudging him over so that Steve could sit in the passenger seat while Bucky drove. 

“Stop thinking about it,” Bucky murmured when they’d been driving for twenty minutes and Steve still hadn’t said a word. “It’s war. This shit happens.”

Steve swallowed, turned his head to Bucky and managed a smile that was a mere baring of teeth. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I think there’s a difference between knowin’ something and believin’ it,” Bucky quipped right back, lighting up a cigarette as they drove. “Can’t save everyone.”

Steve knew that and if he had trouble believing it, then at least today had helped put that in perspective. He looked back out the window, searching for signs of German troops, still holding his pistol in his lap with his finger resting beside the trigger. 

He couldn’t save everyone, but come hell or high water, he was gonna make sure that the Commandos pulled through.

Whatever it cost Steve, Bucky was going to live through this war.

* * * * *

It had been a stupid promise to make to himself, and Steve didn’t know why he was thinking about it.

The camp was there in his mind as he looked across the kitchen to see that Bucky was in the same place where Steve had left him, smoking cigarette after cigarette. The glass of orange juice that Steve had poured for himself was empty now, and without thinking, Steve moved it to the sink and rinsed it out. “I drank that.” Bucky said, and Steve rose his head to look at him.

“I figured.” There was a small smile on Steve’s face, but he wasn’t sure why he was wearing it. He didn’t feel like smiling any more than Bucky seemed to want to. His head was pounding and that promise, that god-damned promise that had been doomed from the start, was still there as an echoing whisper in the back of Steve’s mind. “So do you want to talk about the trains?”

Bucky shrugged, looking past Steve outside the kitchen window. Snow was beginning to fall, and Bucky’s gaze fell down to the counter, to the ashtray that Steve needed to clean out soon. “I don’t know.”

Steve couldn’t help the drop in his stomach, the disappointment that was twisting its way inside of him, but he did his best to keep his face impassive.

“Don’t,” Bucky said, and Steve lifted his head to see that Bucky was staring right at him. There was a frown on Bucky’s face, and Steve had to resist the urge to frown right back at him. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but stop it.” 

Steve rubbed at his face with both hands, unsure of what to do with this situation or with himself. “I don’t know what I’m doing either if you don’t tell me.” 

“You’re being someone else,” Bucky said finally and pushed himself away from the kitchen counter. He crushed out his cigarette and grabbed the pack before heading toward the door. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Want company?” Steve said, every part of him telling him to run after Bucky and keep an eye on him even as he knew that if Bucky said no, Steve had to stay put. Trust was central to all of this, and as much as Steve understood, he hated the way that his movements felt constricted. Didn’t what he wanted matter in all of this? 

“Sure,” Bucky replied as he shrugged on his coat, a second-hand winter jacket that they’d found at a Goodwill. It was blue, the same color as Bucky’s uniform had been when they’d been in the war. Steve wondered if Bucky had known that when he’d picked out the jacket. 

At least Steve wasn’t going to have to argue with himself over this. He pulled on his own jacket, a brown leather one that Pepper had sent to him with Tony’s name on the gift card. It was comfortable and somehow familiar to Steve even though it was still new, and he wondered if Bucky thought the same thing. Even if he wasn’t saying anything, Bucky looked Steve up and down, giving him a nod once Steve had the jacket on. 

The snow was still falling steadily as they made their way outside, crunching underneath Steve’s feet. The world was transformed by the snow, coating it in a pristine white that had Steve sucking in a sharp breath. Bucky’s face was impassive, as if his mind were somewhere else, and Steve wondered if he could remember it. The way the blood looked on the snow in that prison camp they’d liberated, how it hadn’t glistened like he’d thought it would, but had instead looked like someone had taken paint and poured it on the ground. 

Blood should have looked more real than it had in that moment, Steve thought and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Where to?”

Again, Bucky didn’t say anything, but he tilted his head down toward the beach. With the snow falling, it was guaranteed to be empty, and Steve closed his eyes as they walked. His balance was better than it had ever been. Doing this when he’d been younger would have been next to impossible without Bucky to offer a steadying hand, but that was back in Brooklyn, back before the war. Steve didn’t stumble now, and Bucky didn’t offer his arm. 

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a snowfall like this,” Steve said to fill the silence, his own voice sounding loud in his ears. “In the city now... It looks nice for maybe ten minutes before enough cars pass by and it turns into grey sludge.”

“You like this better?” Bucky turned to look at Steve with dark eyes, so intently focused on Steve’s answer that Steve was taken aback. 

“I guess so, it seems peaceful. It reminds me of…” Steve frowned, trying to think of the word. “Peace, I guess.” Steve knew that the answer wasn’t what it should have been and didn’t offer much in the way of illumination, but he shrugged his shoulders. “What does it feel like to you?”

“Home, but not.” Bucky said, and when Steve kept looking at him, it was Bucky’s turn to shrug. He looked uncomfortable as he reached up with his metal arm to rub at the back of his neck, and Steve wanted more than anything to reach out to him, to draw him close and somehow pull all those negative feelings out of the man he’d spent so much of his life with. “Like Russia, but not.”

“Did you like it in Russia?” Steve asked quietly after a moment, and Bucky let out a sharp laugh that quieted Steve down. It was hard to piece together without Bucky telling him, but Steve could make some assumptions. Bucky had fallen from the train in the snow, had been found in the snow, had been trained in the snow… It probably was a strange mix of nostalgia and dislike that was rattling around in Bucky’s mind. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“I was the one who brought it up.” Bucky snapped out the words, and Steve had to suck in a sharp breath, trying to ease his own temper. “Russia was… it was home and not. Closest I could get to home.” His jaw was set so tight that Steve was surprised that he couldn’t hear Bucky’s teeth grinding together. “It’s all a muddled mess up there.” He gestured at his head. “I can’t pull what’s real from what’s not. Everything’s mashed together, and how do I know that it’s even being put together the right way? Like what if the feelings are just getting put with the wrong images and…”

Bucky’s mouth twisted into a grimace, his teeth grinding as he tried to explain. “Some of the memories aren’t real.”

“How do you know that?” Steve raised an eyebrow and Bucky looked away from him.

“Because if they’re all real you’d have to explain how I was born American and grew up as Bucky, but was also a Russian named Yuri.” Bucky paused, looking like he wanted to spit. “It’s not always that easy to figure it out, but… some of ‘em have to be wrong and I can’t always tell.”

Bucky lapsed into silence, and Steve let him, mulling over what the other man had said. It was the most that Bucky had spoken in awhile, and Steve had to wonder just how much of it had been running through his mind before Bucky had been able to bring himself to say anything. “Take your time,” Steve said, and he reached out to touch Bucky lightly on his left arm, the metal cool under his fingertips. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Do we?” Bucky’s voice cracked, and he raised his head to look at Steve, not pulling away from the touch. There was fury there. A pure raw anger that burned in Bucky’s eyes coupled with… Steve couldn’t put his finger on it. Sadness wasn’t the right word, but whatever it was, it was fueling the fury rather than dampening it. 

Steve had never felt so helpless as he did now, standing in the snow. It was being back in the concentration camp all over again, except this time the pistol that Steve was holding was invisible to the eye and he was aiming it at Bucky rather than at the soldiers. Steve could almost hear Anya murmuring in his ear even though she had died years before he’d woken up again. Was he touching the trigger? Steve didn’t know, but he waited, waited for Bucky to say more, and when Bucky didn’t, Steve spoke again. 

“Yeah. We’ve got time.”

They’d never had the time once they’d realized how important it was. The world had been marching to war, and they’d been caught up in it, caught up in the cogs of the machine and forced to make it work. And then after the war, once they’d both woken up… Steve’s chest ached from the thought of it. “We’ll make the time.”

“Were you always this stubborn?” Bucky said, his voice so soft that if it weren’t for his serum enhanced senses, Steve wouldn’t have been able to hear him. 

“I used to be worse.”

“I doubt it.” 

They walked on in silence, the crunch of snow under their feet making up for the talking, and Steve let his hand fall away from Bucky’s arm.

“Can you feel things?”

“What do you mean?” Bucky looked at him, and Steve cracked a crooked smile. 

“Your arm. When I touched it, you didn’t react.” 

“I can feel it,” was all that Bucky would say, and Steve nodded his head, not knowing what else to add to it right away. 

“Did it bother you? That I touched you, I mean.”

“Not as much as it would have before.”

There was hope trying to fight its way up into Steve’s chest, and he ruthlessly pushed it down. There had been so many things that he’d seen, and this was something that he couldn’t allow himself to hope for. For Bucky to learn how to live in this world, that was something that Steve could hope for, but beyond that?

It would just be another blow when the cards didn’t fall that way. Another pressure for Bucky to try and fend off. 

They had almost reached the end of the beach before Bucky spoke again, the snow falling heavily enough that Bucky’s hair was covered in white flakes. “I read that Sergeant Barnes died when he fell from a train.”

“That’s right,” Steve said, his throat tight as he looked out into the darkness of the ocean. “I saw him fall.”

“Was it rusted over?”

“No, it was new.” Steve said, looking down at their footprints that were already getting filled in by the snow. “Gleaming.”

Bucky nodded his head, reaching up with his right hand to brush the snow from his hair. “The one I see is junk. All rusted over. I sit on the edge of it and watch the world go by.”

“Do you like it?” Steve echoed his question from earlier, and Bucky shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s just there.”

Maybe it wasn’t about liking it at all, Steve thought to himself, and he made a mental note to talk to Susan about it. Maybe this was just another thing that would be there, standing in between them. “When’s it there?”

“When I close my eyes,” Bucky said, and Steve stopped him, sucking in a slow breath and exhaling just as slowly. 

“Can you try something with me?”

Bucky didn’t say yes, but he didn’t react negatively to it either, and Steve continued. “I don’t know if it’s healthy or if it’s something that Susan’s gonna rail me out for later, but… close your eyes.”

There was an obvious moment of hesitation, Bucky’s eyes narrowing as if he were trying to figure out what Steve wanted from this. Finally, his eyes flickered shut, but Steve could tell by the stiff way that Bucky was holding himself that he wasn’t pleased about it. “You’re on the train?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it moving?”

“Yeah.”

Steve closed his own eyes, trying to picture it with Bucky. “Try to picture me there too.”

“Why?”

 _Because I don’t want you to be alone,_ Steve thought. _Because I need to be able to be there and to figure out just what’s going on._

“Because I want to understand,” he said instead, and he tried to picture himself on that train, sitting beside Bucky even though the image kept fading away.

When he opened his eyes, Bucky was looking at him, and Steve kicked at the snow as Bucky started walking back toward the light of their beach house. “Was I there?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it bad?”

If Bucky answered him, the wind carried it away before Steve could hear it.

* * * * *

There were days that dragged on forever when Bucky would stay cooped up in his room. Steve would come and leave him food just on the desk, quietly asking how he was doing. Sometimes Steve would linger, and Bucky could hear the questions in his hesitation, embedded in the silence. Most of the time Bucky stayed silent, closing his eyes so he could pretend that Steve wasn’t there. On the particularly bad days, he would move to the window, turn his back to Steve, and wait to hear the door close behind him before he went back to his bed. 

On those worst of days, Steve would knock on the door and leave food outside of it, not wanting to come inside and set Bucky off again. It was easier when he’d just been the Winter Soldier, and Bucky would press his hand against the window pane, staring at his reflection and trying to ignore the pounding at his temples. If he was lucky, the feeling of Winter would come back, and Bucky would slip into that mindset the way that most people would slip on an old shirt. 

Only when he was lucky. Most of the time, Bucky found himself struggling for a peace that didn’t exist any longer. 

Humans were turbulent. They were messy sacks of skin and feelings, an entire universe crammed into a single skeleton, and Bucky fucking hated it. 

Fuck this, he’d think. Fuck everything.

The pain in his head would spike, and Bucky would allow himself the luxury of lying down on his bed, of curling up into a ball and holding his head in his hands. As much as it hurt, he wanted the pain. At least the pain would give him an excuse, an easy way out when Steve came into the room and looked at him with those lips that said nothing and eyes that said too damn much. 

He didn’t know how to put the rest of it into words, the tearing inside of him and the sensitivity, like he’d been badly burned and every touch was pure shards of agony writhing underneath his skin. Bucky wanted to claw at his face, to tear at the skin until there was nothing recognizable. He wanted to tear at his hair, to rip it out at the roots, but it was too messy. His self-preservation programming had been drilled into him too well for Bucky to ruin himself like this. Uncontrolled emotions were drawn back into check, caged in his chest where they burned him from the inside out.

Steve would come in by the time the second day passed, sitting on the edge of the bed with a decent amount of space between the two of them. The first day was always Bucky’s, but on the second day, Steve would come. “Barnes?” He’d say in that soft, questioning lilt, Brooklyn all over his accent. Bucky wanted to push him away, to get him out of here, because Bucky could feel the same thing inside of Steve that was writhing inside of him, and it was killing them both. 

“Why?” He asked one day, his head turned away from Steve and his eyes shut.

“Because I want to.” Steve said, and Bucky wondered what question Steve had finished in his head, if it was a question that Bucky would have even recognized as his own. 

There were better days. Not every day dragged Bucky down into the abyss, but enough of them did that Steve started becoming better at seeing the signs for it. “The Fall” they called it with a capital “F”. It became a strange dance between the two of them, Bucky talking about losing his balance while Steve gently tried to push him to speak more clearly. 

This was as clear as it could get in Bucky’s head. Everything was a cacophony, and he longed for the clearness of Winter’s mind. It had been a hell of its own, but at least it was a familiar one. Today was one of those days, nearly a week since they’d walked on the beach and talked of trains. Bucky hadn’t brought up The Fall and Steve hadn’t asked him. Instead they’d sat in the main room, Steve trying to sketch while Bucky read a book. 

_“I’m here,” Bucky didn’t say._

_“I know,” Steve didn’t answer._

That much, Bucky could be sure was all in his mind. It was hard to tell sometimes where the lines were and when reality was warping around itself and twisting itself into merry little knots. There were voices in the back of his head, not unlike the ones he could vaguely remember hearing back during his training. He’d talked about it with Susan, whether that meant he had something like schizophrenia, and she’d paused for a moment before shaking her head. 

Auditory and visual hallucinations under duress weren’t uncommon. 

But what about now? Bucky wanted to ask about the little niggling thoughts in the back of his head, that insidious voice that he knew to be his own, but couldn’t stop listening to regardless. 

He looked up from his book and over at Steve. Despite the years that had passed between them, at a quick glance it looked like nothing about him had changed. There was something different, something off, but Bucky couldn’t put his finger on it, and he didn’t try to hard to. Steve was uncomfortable and safe, he was volatile and steady, he was everything that Bucky wanted to be and didn’t want to be all in one. The contradictions made Bucky mad, the fury rising up to choke him before the automatic response in the back of his head choked it back. 

The room was warm, soft music playing from Steve’s Stark tech over in the corner, and Steve was sitting there on the couch, like there’d never been a war, like there’d never been an end, like he was untouched by it all. There were no scratches on the surface of his mask and somehow that made it worse, made Bucky feel sometimes like he was sliding right off of some kind of invisible wall that had been thrown up between them. 

_What if this isn’t real?_ The thought came unbidden and Bucky shoved it away, pushing himself to his feet. Steve looked up, confusion flitting across his face as Bucky dropped the book down on the floor. 

“Everything okay?”

It’s real. 

Bucky’s hands were clenched into fists at his side, his jaw tight. 

The voice in the back of his head let out a soft, sly chuckle. If Bucky had been able to see it, that voice would have been shaking its head.

_Would you even be able to tell?_

* * * * *

Natasha was a woman of her word.

She was careful about giving it, but when she did finally make a promise, she was good about keeping it. “It’s all in the inflection,” Clint had said back when he could still hear the tone in her voice. “Say it one way, you’re gonna keep your promise. But if there’s that slight change in tone, that means you’re lying through your teeth.”

Natasha had tried to get Clint to tell her what she did exactly. She tried bullying, she tried cold shoulders, and once she’d tried seduction, but that had ended up with both her and Clint giggling in the heat of the moment and the hangover of the century when they’d woken up. 

“I can’t explain it,” Clint had said with a shrug of his shoulders, tucking a long strand of hair behind Natasha’s ear as he grinned at her. “You might as well give up.”

She had been naked and pressed against him when he said this, acutely aware of the hand that was sliding its way down her back. “Not that I’m complaining,” Clint said as his hand reached the curve of Natasha’s ass. “But if we’re gonna do this, I’d rather it not be for…”

Clint paused, a smirk curling his lips when he thought of the way he wanted to explain it. “I’d rather you be pumping me for pleasure instead of information.”

Natasha rolled her eyes even thinking about it. There were times when Clint was as bad as Tony. Worse, even. But he was right about her and her promises. 

But promises didn’t seem to matter when Natasha made them to herself. She’d told herself that she would stay far away from this. From Steve and from Barnes both because it all tread too close to home. Yet here she was, standing on the porch of a house in front of a snowy beach. A place that no one was supposed to be able to find, but that Natasha had only needed a couple days before she’d been able to find the address.

There was a reason that Steve made a better soldier than a spy, and that was because his ability to think of fake names was adorable. Also there were traces of him all over this place. A newly registered library card for Steve Grant had been used nearby. A badly beaten punching back was hanging from a tree in the front yard. 

And Sam Wilson came to visit here. 

Check and mate. 

Natasha had thought about announcing her presence before coming. It was the least she could do, but to call ahead felt like she had already decided when Natasha was still wavering, even now. 

To hell with it.

Steve answered when Natasha knocked on the door, his eyebrow raising toward the heavens when he saw that she was here. “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with this.”

“I don’t.” Natasha’s mouth thinned into a single line, her frown obvious. “If I thought I could walk out of here right now, I would.”

“No one’s stopping you,” Steve said, his voice soft, and Natasha fixed him with a withering look. 

“I’m stopping me.” 

Steve looked at her for a long moment, weighing the options in his mind before he stepped to one side and gestured for her to come in. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked, and Natasha shook her head. She had only come for one thing and the sooner she was done, the sooner she could be on her way. “He’s in his bedroom,” Steve said and gestured toward the second floor. “First door on your right.” 

The tension that Natasha had thought she’d long since been rid of was back, twisting its way through her stomach. She tamped those feelings down with the ruthless efficiency of someone who had a large amount of practice in it, nodding her thanks to Steve before making her way upstairs. The house was so unlike the places that she knew. Closer to the farm that Clint had than anything else, and Clint was there at the back of her mind as Natasha climbed the stairs. She almost felt like he was standing right there at her shoulder, signing something stupid in an attempt to make her smile. 

Barnes was in the room that Steve had pointed out, and Natasha knocked first on the door before she let herself in. She’d barely made it two steps before Barnes was on his feet, shifting into a fighting stance as he eyed her. “Where’s Steve?” he asked, and Natasha held her hands up to show that she was unarmed. 

“He’s fine. He’s just downstairs.” 

Barnes brushed past her, shifting Natasha out of the way, and she heard his light footsteps down the stairs. He must have seen Steve because he came back up quickly and looked at her again before heading back into his room. “What do you want?” 

“To talk,” Natasha said, and Barnes narrowed his eyes at her. Sighing, she switched over to Russian. “Don’t you remember me, Yuri?”

“I don’t remember anything,” he said, his voice when he switched to Russian almost achingly familiar, and she wondered if he knew it. 

“Natalia Romanova was my name back then.” And Natasha watched as Yuri squinted, rubbing at his temples. “I can tell you about it if you’d like.”

“I’d like,” Yuri said, gesturing with one hand even as he took his seat on the bed. Natasha took a seat on the surface of the desk, her feet resting on the chair. “I’m tired of people who know more about me than I do.”

“Maybe they know more about your past, but you’re the one who knows your future.” 

Yuri shrugged, as if he were easing a cloak off of his shoulders, and Natasha held back her smile. How she had loved watching those shoulders all those years ago. “So where should I start?”

“From the beginning,” Yuri said, his tone gruff as he looked over at her. He was different from the way that Natasha had expected him to be. Barnes was lost alongside Captain America, but thinking as Yuri seemed to have given him a boost. 

“We were in the Red Room together,” Natasha said finally, looking over at him and giving him a tight smile. There were so few people who knew about the time in Red Room that she had only talked about it when the other person needed it. “They were training us, you see. I thought I was a ballerina, I thought I performed in front of packed crowds.”

“And me?”

“You were a special case. We’d heard that you were… not part of the ballet, which is just as well. Your… war-time injury made you unsuited, they would say.” Natasha shrugged her shoulders. “So they hired you as a bodyguard, the story goes. You were there to protect the lives of the dancers.”

Yuri pursed his lips as he thought about it, idly reaching for a gun that wasn’t there on his hip. “It seems like a waste, no? To use a weapon for such.”

“Not if the people you’re protecting were also assassins.” Natasha’s smile was tight, and she nearly picked up something from the desk to play with, to keep her fingers busy before she stopped herself. “Trust me, I never held you back when it came to a mission, Yuri.”

“And we became lovers?”

“We became lovers.” Natasha nodded her head. “I was one of the stars of the program and you… you were a different kind of star. I think they fostered the relationship between us. I think it pleased them to add more data to their formulations.” She looked down at her hands for a moment before raising her head to look up at him. “I think I might have loved you. It’s hard to say.”

Yuri looked at her for a long moment before he turned his head to look out the window. Natasha let him, let it sink back into his mind. “And did I love you back?”

“You said you did, but who knows?” Taking a chance, Natasha moved away from the desk and sat on the bed near Yuri. “It was a long time ago. It feels like a lifetime ago.”

“So what changed?”

“You escaped one day.”

That sentence had Yuri snapping his attention back to Natasha. “You just disappeared while on the middle of a mission and didn’t come back. I thought that maybe you’d found another ballerina.” The look on her face betrayed how stupid she thought that was now. “But I was young, and you were the first man I’d really been allowed to come in contact with. I did foolish things.”

“Like what?”

“Like going to the director of the school and telling her we had to find you because I might have been carrying your child.”

Yuri blanched at that, his gaze traveling down Natasha’s body to her stomach as if he still expected to see a child there. 

“Don’t worry. I was never pregnant.”

“There are no children?” Yuri’s eyes were dark as he lifted his gaze back to Natasha’s face.

“They made that impossible the natural way.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Stark has created an entirely new element on his own, and together with Banner and some lightning, he created an entirely new life form.” Natasha’s lips curled into a smirk. “Do you think I couldn’t find some way to have children if I truly wanted to have them?”

Yuri was quiet for a moment after that, and Natasha reached up, nearly taking Yuri’s hand into hers before she hesitated and let her hand fall back to her side. She’d had more experience than she could remember with volatile, broken men. It seemed that if Natasha had a type, that was what she was drawn to, and yet, Yuri had been her first. And whether he had loved her back or not, she had loved him.

It didn’t matter as much as it probably should have that she had been brainwashed into it. 

The feelings were real even if the methods had not been.

She nearly jerked away when Yuri reached out to take her hand into his, using his right hand instead of the metal arm. “How are you doing?” she asked finally, gesturing with her free hand at the room around them. “With all this?”

Yuri was quiet for a long time and then, in a low murmur. “I don’t know.” 

“I didn’t either when I broke free.” Natasha said, her voice soft. There was a warmth to Yuri’s hand that she hadn’t expected, part of her mind still thinking that he should have been as cold as winter itself was. “It takes a lot of getting used to. I still struggle with who I am sometimes.”

“The Captain thinks that I’ll be able to do it.”

“The Captain has great faith in you,” Natasha said, shrugging her shoulders. 

“And you? Do you have that faith?”

“Not everyone makes it.” Natasha’s voice was soft as she raised her head to look at Yuri, and he held onto her hand tight enough that it might have hurt if she hadn’t been so used to pain. “Not everyone is able to shake free of the heaviest weights the past puts on us.”

“I just want to forget it all sometimes.”

“Then do that.”

“But the Captain…”

“Will understand,” Natasha finished for him, squeezing his hand once more before pulling her hand back. “He knows better than most how heavy the past can be.”

“He wants his friend back.”

“Yes.” There was no mincing words about that. “I think in his best case scenario, he’d want back the man who was his best friend.”

“And his lover.”

“And his lover.” Natasha could feel herself softening at the thought before she steeled herself again. “But what he wants most for you is for you to be able to live your life. A normal life, one where there’s no one holding your leash or forcing you to kill.”

“Is there such thing for people like us? A normal life?” Yuri looked up at her with those dark eyes that Natasha had been able to drown in when she was young. She was older now and resisted the pull. This wasn’t her Yuri any more than he was Steve’s Bucky. This was someone different, struggling to find their own way and at Yuri’s question, Natasha managed a smile even though it was grim. 

“Only if we can carve it out for ourselves.”

* * * * *

Natasha left well after midnight, fending off Steve’s offer to find her a ride as Bucky watched. It had been strange and almost comfortable to slip into being Yuri for the time that she had been there. It was like meeting an old friend, someone who you couldn’t quite place but had a good feeling about. That was Yuri. He had been calm, less turbulent than Bucky had ever felt without slipping into the soul-deadening cold that was the Winter Soldier. 

Bucky sat at the counter and smoked, watching the two people who had been his lovers in the past argue about taxis. Steve had his hands on his hips, Natasha had her arms crossed over her chest, and Bucky exhaled slowly, just taking in the show. Natasha’s English had no accent that Bucky could detect. It was as natural as his own English was, but there was that hard edge to it that he could hear in his own voice when he spoke. Maybe that was part of what the Red Room did, Bucky thought to himself as he watched.

They had kissed. Natasha and Steve had kissed while trying to hide from Hydra, and Bucky found the thought amusing. Natasha had mentioned it briefly offhand when she was recounting what it had been like to be on the run with Steve.

“You two really kissed?” Bucky found himself saying, slipping into Russian more naturally than English, and the argument cut off abruptly. Both Steve and Natasha looked at him, raising an eyebrow, but Natasha was the one who answered him, a smile playing on her lips. 

“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” Natasha said, the words rolling fluidly off her tongue. “Should I apologize?”

Bucky shrugged, ashing his cigarette before taking another drag. “Was he any good?” 

Natasha thought for a moment and then gave her head a small shake. “He was rusty.” 

“Somehow…” Bucky flicked his gaze over to Steve before it turned back to Natasha. “I feel like he was always like that.” 

Steve raised an eyebrow at both of them and for the first time in what felt like ages, Bucky found himself grinning at both Steve and Natasha. Natasha grinned back at him and was about to open her mouth to reply when Steve spoke over her instead. In perfect Russian.

“I can understand you, punks.” Steve spoke and both former Russian assassins looked like they had been caught at something. Steve laughed then, shaking his head as he looked at Natasha. “You shouldn’t be surprised, you’re the one who taught me.”

“I corrected your pronunciation of a couple words.” Natasha said and took a couple steps back toward the door. “I didn’t know you went and studied on your own.”

“I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands,” Steve said, and Natasha eyed him for a long moment before pushing herself up to press her lips to Steve’s cheek. 

“You keep telling yourself that, Rogers.” She pulled back and gave Bucky a small salute. “See you, Barnes.”

The place was so much quieter after she left that Bucky didn’t know what to do about it. It had been easier when she was here, easier to be Yuri and pretend that he’d never heard of James Barnes or the Winter Soldier. “How was it?” Steve asked as he moved over to the counter, but Bucky didn’t answer him right away. Instead he crushed out his cigarette.

“You don’t talk much about us as lovers,” he said finally, and Steve jerked his head around so quick that it almost seemed like Bucky had punched him. “You’re really careful about that.” 

“I don’t want to…” Steve sighed, caught himself, and then tried again. “It’s a lot of pressure to put on someone.”

“But we were lovers.”

“Yeah, but…” 

“But?”

“I’m not expecting you to just pick up where we left off.”

“Noted,” Bucky reached for his cigarettes and picked up another one, lighting it before he grabbed the ashtray to move over to the couch. He had started sitting on the floor in front of the couch, leaning back against it. It was more comfortable for him even though Bucky wasn’t quite sure why that was the case. 

“Do you want me to talk about it?” Steve let out a long sigh as he followed Bucky to the main room to sit on the couch. “I never know what to do, Barnes.” His voice was softer as he admitted that, and Bucky shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know what to do either; neither of them had been trained for this. The world was great at creating soldiers, not turning them back into civilians. 

“I don’t either.”

Steve was quiet for a long moment, and Bucky had nearly finished off his second cigarette when Steve moved again. He didn’t speak or offer it, just went upstairs and when he came back down he had bedding in his arms along with two pillows. “Couch or floor?”

Bucky frowned, narrowing his eyes at Steve. “Couch,” he said without thinking, and Steve shot him a wan grin. 

“Suit yourself,” he said and went about setting up a makeshift bed for Bucky on the couch. Bucky let Steve nudge him out of the way as Steve set up an identical bed for himself on the floor. “I’m not feeling a movie tonight. How tired are you?”

Bucky looked up at Steve, and for the first time, he looked past the smile that was resting on Steve’s lips. It was a mask, he realized, blinking a couple times as he processed that information. “I’m not tired,” Bucky said, and Steve nodded his head, disappearing again for a minute or two only to come back with his Stark Tablet. “Here, I’ve got it open to what I read when I can’t sleep.”

“It’s a book?” Bucky frowned at the screen. “An encyclopedia?”

“Yeah, except better,” Steve said as he settled down on the floor, closing his eyes. Bucky flipped through a couple entries on the website as he waited for Steve to fall asleep. The original plan had just been to do this for half an hour or so and then once Steve had fallen asleep to switch over to top-ten videos or pirated animal documentaries - something more interesting than reading about history. But as Bucky clicked through the pages on the encyclopedia, he found himself getting wound up in it. There was more information here than he’d ever seen in one place or even dreamed of.

On a whim, Bucky clicked over to the Captain America page, and every so often he would look over at Steve who was sleeping restlessly on the floor. Without realizing it, a small smile graced Bucky’s lips as he read about Steve’s exploits. 

They got it pretty close to reality, he thought. 

All they had left out was what a huge dork Steve was.

* * * * *

**James Buchanan Barnes**  
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 **This page is currently protected from editing until May 6th, 2016 or until disputes have been resolved.**   
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_ Contents [hide]   
1 Early Life  
2 Military Life  
3 Personal Life  
4 Supposed Death  
5 The Winter Soldier  
6 References _

The men who stood beside Captain America are often overshadowed by the towering figure in legend that Steve Rogers cuts. James Buchanan Barnes, affectionately known to his friends as “Bucky”, would have also been a good candidate to have been Captain America if he had not been overseas at the time [citation needed]. 

Early Life  
Does anyone actually care about this?

Military Life  
Barnes, who was actually a better student than Rogers [citation needed] and an athlete during his school years was also a skilled tactician and sniper. It has been hypothesized by some that he is the one who taught Rogers everything that he knew about commanding troops and thus, was a key factor in the success of the Howling Commandos as a leader as well as a sniper [citation needed]. 

Personal Life  
Best known for being the best friend of Captain America, Barnes is also widely thought to have been deeply in love with Steve Rogers [citation needed].

Supposed Death  
He was probably an idiot about it [citation needed]. He was probably sorry about making things difficult [citation needed].

The Winter Soldier  
But not as sorry as he is about everything that happened while he couldn’t remember. [citation needed]

References  
Does it matter?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title, chapter title, and chapter lyrics taken from [Ghost Towns by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUA9hoDa40)  
> 


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